WASHINGTON — President Trump had choice words Wednesday for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the four Republicans who helped Democrats pass a war powers resolution restraining Trump’s use of force against Iran.
He spoke at a closed-door luncheon with Senate Republicans at the Capitol. Murkowski missed the first part of the event so she escaped Trump’s direct attack. Colleagues filled her in on a meeting she describes as fiery.
Trump was “letting loose on the Republican conference,” Murkowski said. “Let's just put it that way.”
Trump has been at odds with Senate Republicans for weeks, and his ire extends beyond Murkowski, who sometimes votes against his bills and nominees. As Murkowski sees it, Trump has been tossing “bombs,” blowing up not only the senators’ agenda but derailing his own priorities.
One explosion came just before the fireworks at lunch. The Capitol’s Statuary Hall was set for a fancy bill-signing ceremony. The idea was to celebrate passage of a bipartisan bill to address America’s housing crisis. Murkowski said it was good legislation, and it passed both chambers by enormous margins.
“I would think that that would be a really good reminder to the president that this is something good for him, good for the country, and why would he not want to have the biggest, best press conference ever?” she said. “I don't know.”
Trump, though, abruptly cancelled the ceremony, saying on social media he won’t sign the bill until Congress sends him the SAVE America Act, a voter i.d. bill that also requires proof of citizenship at registration.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, among others, have repeatedly said that’s unrealistic, that the bill does not have the 60 votes needed for passage.
So instead of going into the GOP lunch celebrating the housing bill, Trump was irate, over the war powers vote, among other things.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said he stood up to Trump — literally, even after Trump told him to sit down.
“He was asking why anybody would vote for the War Powers Act. I said, ‘Is that a rhetorical question, or you want to know?’” Cassidy recounted to reporters.
Cassidy said he listed his reasons: That Congress wasn’t properly briefed on the war, that it fell short of its objectives and “that it's not going as well as we're being told.”
“At which point I think the president said something negative about me,” Cassidy recalled. “I perceived it as attempting to bully me from asking a question that I think the American people need to know, and I'm not going to be bullied when I feel like I'm asking a question the American people need to know.”
Hours later, though, Cassidy acquiesced to Trump, voting against a war powers resolution that was nearly identical to the one he helped pass the day before. Of the four Republicans who voted for it Tuesday, only Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine kept to that position Wednesday.
Lunch aside, Murkowski said it’s been “a rough couple of weeks.”
Trump has been relying on Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson to carry his priorities, she said, but then he actively works against them. Trump often causes his own bills to stall by suddenly insisting senators add things like his anti-weaponization fund, to compensate people he deems wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. Or his insistence on passing the SAVE America Act.
“The president should not be injecting these bombs at the last minute and making it harder for these leaders to do their job,” she said.
Murkowski herself is often accused of impeding the Republican agenda by voting against certain bills and nominees. She said she has to do what she thinks is right.
She’s been explaining the dynamic to Capitol Hill reporters by way of sled dog analogies: Each dog has some latitude to move independently, she said, but the musher needs to keep the whole team going in the same direction or it’s chaos.
