Senate GOP faces grueling 'marathon' as they fight off 'heartburn' from Trump

Senate Republicans are bracing for an end-of-week slog of votes as tension continues to build with the Trump White House, Punchbowl News reported on Thursday morning.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) face "a marathon of twisting arms and whipping votes on two pieces of legislation that have little in common" other than the fact that "Trump has made passing them much harder than it needed to be," said the report — namely, the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorization, and the Homeland Security reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement.

The "heartburn" Republicans face, per the report, is that Trump has complicated all of this by demanding $1 billion for "security" for his White House ballroom project, something the GOP has finally rejected outright; introduced and backed off the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" which has forced Senate Republicans to consider banning it directly in their legislation; and nominating his unqualified and highly partisan housing finance chief Bill Pulte to serve as Director of National Intelligence, which has caused Democrats to threaten a boycott of FISA.

The weaponization fund alone has created additional pain points by causing some Republicans to demand a formal ban on the fund in the reconciliation as a condition for their vote, with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) saying, “We need to take action here. It’s creating headwinds that we don’t need. If we’ve got the acting AG saying it’s done, then let’s just stick a fork in it.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), meanwhile, plans to introduce an amendment requiring a rewrite of the bill to include this language. Only four Republican votes would be needed to pass it.

The upshot, per other reports, is that Republicans on Capitol Hill are privately enraged at Trump for constantly tripping up not only their priorities, but his own.