Congress: The Senate & The House

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💣 GOP powder keg

Sens. Mike Lee and Rick Scott have teed up what could be a tense, confrontational lunch tomorrow with President Trump and Senate Republicans.

• The two spent months pressuring Senate Majority Leader John Thune on the SAVE America Act. Now Trump will be in the room with them.

Why it matters: Trump is fixated on passing the SAVE Act to help Republicans in the midterms. But Thune is insistent that Republicans don't have the votes.

• "There are not the votes to nuke the filibuster, and there aren't going to be 10 Democrat votes to all of a sudden support the SAVE America Act," Thune told reporters today.
• SAVE would require voter ID and proof of citizenship, while imposing new restrictions on mail-in voting.

Zoom in: Scott invited Trump to attend the weekly lunch put on by the conservative Senate GOP Steering Committee.

• Thune laughed when asked whether Scott checked with him before extending the invite. "Well, he told me he did it," Thune told reporters.
• Scott sent a letter to senators yesterday outlining what he thinks the chamber's focus should be — including passing the SAVE America Act or parts of it, according to a copy we obtained.

Between the lines: Senate GOP leadership has largely learned to negotiate with and work around staunch conservatives like Lee and Scott. But some senators are losing patience.

• "I never speak ill of members when they want to be professional," Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters today after accusing Lee of "naivete" or wanting "to get more likes on social media posts."
• "But when you do some of the bullshit [Lee has] done on social media, that's why he gets these comments out here," he added.
• "I think Mike Lee is contributing to this fantasy that somehow it's going to happen," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters.

The big picture: The SAVE Act got 48 votes earlier this month when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tried adding it as an amendment to the budget reconciliation bill.

• Former GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Tillis voted against it.
• The closest the GOP got was 53 votes for a narrower amendment requiring photo ID to vote. Three other amendments requiring IDs for registering to vote or requiring proof of citizenship failed to get more than 50 votes when they came up in April and June.
• "The will is not there, and the votes aren't there. ... I'm into reality," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told us when asked about Lee and Scott's efforts.

But Scott and Lee are publicly pushing leadership to use aggressive procedural tactics until the bill passes.

• "Let's pass the SAVE America Act now," Lee replied yesterday to a post from Thune's X account. "As I've been asking you to do for months, please bring it up now and announce that we will debate it until it passes."
• Thune retorted today: "Sometimes when something hasn't been done in 100 years there's a reason for that."

— Stef Kight

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War powers

In a rare bipartisan move, the Senate on Tuesday voted to limit President Trump's war powers by directing him to remove US military forces from the conflict in Iran. The measure sends a clear signal that many lawmakers remain uneasy about deeper US involvement. President Trump, meanwhile, called the vote "poorly timed and meaningless." Read more.

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🤬 Summer from hell

President Trump is making life hell for Senate Republicans, and they're returning the favor.

• "I make no apologies for standing up to the president," Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told reporters after he got into a shouting match with Trump today at a Senate GOP lunch. "I made it clear that I wasn't going to be bullied."

🤬 Why it matters: One of the deepest GOP ruptures of Trump's second term has opened over his push for a pre-midterm elections crackdown via the SAVE Act.

• To his fury, Trump is finding that senators he's written off, alienated or even helped defeat in primaries are choosing Senate traditions over his political demands.
• In the middle is Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who's been blunt with the reality that Trump doesn't have the votes to get what he wants.
• "I'm certainly not giving my consent to that," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters today about ending the filibuster.

‼️ Zoom in: Trump's lunch today with Senate Republicans only seemed to move White House-Senate relations from bad to worse.

• It became a shouting match with Cassidy over the administration's lack of information-sharing with the Senate on Iran.
• Trump rubbed Cassidy's primary defeat last month in his face during the closed-door meeting, sources told us.

🛑 Just before the lunch, Trump canceled an event to sign and tout a bipartisan housing package — a bill the White House praised yesterday as "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history."

• Trump said he would not sign the bill until the SAVE Act, requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote, is passed.
• Last week, Trump delayed the Senate confirmation process for Jay Clayton, ensuring Bill Pulte would serve as acting director of national intelligence, at least temporarily.
• The president has continued his long campaign against the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation in the Senate, and the blue slips process, which allows senators to block judicial nominations in their state.

👎 The other side: The bloc of GOP senators willing to defy Trump has grown.

• Cassidy and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have been far more willing to speak their mind since losing recent primaries to Trump-backed candidates.
• They join Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who are leaving the Senate and have less reason to fear Trump's political blowback.
• That's on top of the usual suspects like Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Murkowski, who have long been willing to vote against their party.

The bottom line: It's a midterm year. Republicans want to talk about affordability and hammer democratic socialists.

• Instead, they're sitting through presidential rants about the filibuster and legislation with no clear path through the Senate.

— Stef Kight

Go deeper

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Dems fear their own Freedom Caucus

Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios

House Democrats are preparing for a caucus in 2027 that is expected to be significantly more outspoken and left-wing than the one they have now. Why it matters: It wasn't all that easy to integrate the four-member "Squad" into the Democratic fold. Now, party leadership anticipates it will have to contend with a much larger cohort of rabble-rousers. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) predicted "it will be difficult" to rein in these newly elected democratic socialists: "I think people that follow that [ideology] will cause problems." "If they're actually serious legislators, then they're going to have to be able to work with people," a House Democrat told us. "If not, then they'll just be the Freedom Caucus of the left." Driving the news: The number of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in Congress is set to more than double following yesterday's New York primaries. State Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat of retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.). They join Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, a DSA member who won the primary to succeed Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Pa.) last month, along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Zoom out: Factoring in left-wing candidates broadly aligned with the DSA, the numbers get even more daunting for the party establishment. The primary wins of now-Rep. Analilia Mejia and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, the Rev. Frederick Haynes III in Texas, Randy Villegas in California and Matthew Dunlap in Maine were all major victories for the left. Several other progressives are seen as well-positioned to potentially unseat incumbent House Democrats: Mai Vang and Angela Gonzales-Torres in California, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Elijah Manley in Florida, former Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri, and Donavan McKinney in Michigan. What we're hearing: These candidates are already communicating and coordinating with each other in various text chains, with several telling us they plan to continue to work together as a bloc in Congress. "We have to deliver something, and whether it's being a part of the Congressional Progressive [Caucus] or maybe doing our own thing, I don't know," McKinney said. "We have to just push and people have to see us fighting." Said Vang: "As a new cohort of progressive elected, we have leverage ... so [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries needs to be aligned with that. And when I get to the halls of Congress, I do look forward to organizing with my colleagues." Jeffries "knows how to pull people together," said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who is a member of Democratic leadership, noting that Ocasio-Cortez "has been a part of our caucus for a long time." — Andrew Solender