Even with Trump’s support, a split among Senate Republicans nearly tanked the bipartisan bill.
Just hours before the Senate passed major reforms to the criminal justice system, Mike Lee and Tom Cotton were still bickering.
At a private party lunch, the two young Republican senators argued one last time: The libertarian-leaning Lee defended a bill the hawkish Cotton had derided as a “jailbreak” for violent felons, while Cotton accused Lee of overseeing a sloppy process that included last-minute revisions to the bill, according to multiple sources familiar with the interaction.
“It got a little heated, on his part,” Lee said.
The dispute neatly encapsulated why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was so reluctant to put the bill on the floor in the first place and publicly split his party. But even the skeptical GOP leader could not ultimately stop the bill: President Donald Trump supported it, and McConnell himself wound up voting for it. The legislation passed 87-12 on Tuesday night after a bipartisan coalition handily dispatched a trio of Cotton’s amendments intended to kill the bill.
Yet the whopping vote margin masked a years-long struggle inside the Republican Party that dates back to the presidency of Barack Obama. It brought together a mix of veteran lawmakers in Congress and political neophytes in the White House, with a coalition that was set to crumble without action in the last days of the 115th Congress.
Though less sweeping than the bipartisan efforts under Obama to rewrite prison and sentencing laws, Trump’s expected signature serves as a cathartic coda for the effort’s supporters — one that is being celebrated as a rare bipartisan victory in an era when the parties are bitterly divided against each other and the government is regularly on the brink of a shutdown.
For months, criminal justice reform seemed to be on life support. As its prospects grew dimmer and dimmer, the outgoing Senate Majority Whip, John Cornyn, began taking arrows from the bill’s supporters for refusing to lean on McConnell to put the bill on the floor.
Cornyn was in a bind: He’s a longtime advocate for overhauling federal prisons and sentencing programs but he also is his party’s chief vote-counter. Lee and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) insisted their legislation had overwhelming GOP backing, but Cornyn’s whip cards showed the support level was simply not where McConnell wanted it.
He knew it would be counterproductive to make a public push for the sphinx-like McConnell to take up a bill that divided his party. So Cornyn kept trying to shift the bill to be ever-so-slightly more conservative while holding onto its Democratic support. He also kept his own endorsement of the effort to himself. Even Grassley wondered aloud what Cornyn was waiting for at such a critical moment.
“I had a responsibility not to put the leader in the box by talking publicly about what I was doing, but working quietly behind the scenes trying to build support,” Cornyn said in an interview in his ornate Capitol Hill office. “He never was the bill’s biggest fan. I think he still has reservations about it… it’s important that we’re able to trust each other. And it’s important for us to be able to act confidentially.”
Cornyn kept his powder dry on endorsing the bill until McConnell announced he would put it on the floor last week, after repeated public and private prodding from Trump.
