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 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to put the bill on the floor. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Congress ‘It got a little heated’: GOP infighting almost killed criminal justice reform 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.

Asked to respond, Cotton laughed and replied: "He thought that was heated? He needs to toughen up."

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. The House is expected to pass the bill this week.

The whopping vote margin in the Senate masked a yearslong struggle inside the Republican Party that dated 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.

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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.

Cornyn 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," he said, adding that "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 last week he would put it on the floor, after repeated public and private prodding from Trump.

Lee was unenthusiastic when asked about Cornyn’s role in securing the bill’s passage, instead noting his personal whipping operation, a rare effort by a rank-and-file senator to keep his own competing tally with Republican leadership.

“The suggestion the last few weeks that my whip count was exaggerated? I think this helps prove it was wrong. I was very, very careful in my whip count. I was very precise,” Lee said.

In the end, though, it was a fragile coalition that pushed the bill across the finish line, many of its members feeling urgency due to their own political circumstances. Cornyn is term-limited from his job as whip, Grassley is leaving his Judiciary Committee post to lead the Finance Committee, and Democrats are about to take the House, where they could likely pull any bill to the left.

Of the 30 bills his panel will have gotten signed into law by Trump this Congress, Grassley said, “This will be the most significant one.”

Cotton and Lee, meanwhile, were the two GOP young bucks fighting over the merits of the bill in public, on the Senate floor and in the party lunches. But the old bulls battled too, albeit over strategy: Cornyn was pressing for a narrower, prison-only reform that he thought more politically feasible, while Grassley held out for sentencing reforms, part of an agreement he struck with Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in the beginning of the Trump administration.

Critics like Cotton slammed many aspects of the prison reform legislation anyway. But Cornyn argued that pushing that proposal was the more pragmatic path.

“I’m an art-of-the-possible guy,” Cornyn said. By insisting on sentencing reform, “I felt like we were heading down a path where we weren’t getting anything done.”

But those focused on sentencing reform enjoyed something of a trump card: the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Kushner had harbored an interest in the topic for years, but he began getting serious about it last year. In October 2017, he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, both White House officials, invited Lee, Durbin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to dinner. Whitehouse and Cornyn had just introduced a prison reform bill that lacked the more sweeping changes sought by Grassley, Lee and Durbin.

But Durbin and Lee told the couple that they weren’t going to go for a prison-only reform bill: It needed to get rid of harsh mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent crimes. And, the bipartisan duo said, they needed Grassley.

“We worked for a year so he could accept it and be the lead sponsor. It made all the difference,” Durbin said. “We had a good bill, but it was not destined to pass and become law without Grassley’s leadership.”

When Cornyn and Whitehouse introduced their prison-only bill in 2017, Grassley refused to give his support. Even when the House passed prison reforms in the spring, Grassley, Durbin and Lee stood firm: They wanted sentencing reforms in the bill.

There’s a “lot of injustice in the judicial system. And we have to have a fair judicial system. And I have to admit I was awakened to that because of the arguments that Lee and Durbin put forth over a long period of time,” Grassley said.

In the interim, Grassley began accruing major credibility on the right by helping to confirm lower-court judges and then playing a central role in confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in October. On criminal justice reform, he had chips to cash in with McConnell.

“Chuck Grassley can be very persuasive,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “Chuck Grassley has been a very loyal, effective soldier.”

Kushner was persuasive too, spending hours talking to the bill’s supporters, from Cornyn to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), about building support for the effort.

Inside the White House, Kushner hosted numerous roundtables with supporters and opponents alike. He made emotional pleas to lawmakers, invoking the challenging conditions his father faced in federal prison, where he served 14 months after pleading guilty to a series of nonviolent offenses.

“Jared has not been shy that this arose out of a personal experience. It’s been helpful because people see that because it’s a personal issue for him, it gives him a ton of credibility on the legislation, so it’s something that he had not shied away from,” said a White House official.

At several points, his White House colleagues dismissed him as naïve, waving off the possibility that his efforts could turn into law. But it was Kushner who was key to enlisting the support of the law-and-order president, a feat he accomplished by bringing a parade of criminal justice reform supporters through the Oval Office, from celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and her husband, Kanye West, to Trump-supporting evangelicals who backed the bill.

Durbin, meanwhile, was tasked with keeping Democrats together even as the bill shifted away from them. The No. 2 Senate Democrat had spent untold time and energy working on the issue, and he was willing to be pragmatic to get it done even if his party’s fortunes would improve with a Democratic House takeover.

“This is something that Durbin, who’s a real hero on this, has worked on for five years. He’s built up a trust with our colleagues,” Booker said. “We’re putting our reputations on the line endorsing this bill.”

In the end, every Senate Democrat supported the bill. But for several weeks they mostly kept quiet as the the Republicans fought among themselves.

None of the work by Kushner, Cornyn, Lee, Durbin or Booker would matter unless McConnell would put the bill on the floor. And the GOP leader kept telling Trump that he didn’t have time to bring it to the floor, with a government funding deadline to meet and nominees to confirm.

Before the election, McConnell had promised Cornyn, Grassley, Lee and other supporters that he would do so if he could be showed the bill could easily pass the Senate. That vow produced the competing whip counts between Cornyn and Lee, as each sought to deliver the majority leader an accurate picture of the vote count.

Even as advocates said support was growing, McConnell was unmoved and Trump generally kept quiet about the bill. Advocates for the bill said the president was playing a more subdued role on it than most other issues but was ready to put pressure on McConnell if he felt it was needed.

On Dec. 7, Trump unleashed a tweet asking McConnell to make good on his word: “Go for it Mitch!,” the president urged the GOP leader.

Three days later, McConnell indicated to Cornyn that the bill would come to the floor, the end of a yearslong saga to finish work on one of the few issues that seems to unite most in both parties these days.

“He’s a man of his word,” Cornyn said of McConnell. And every bit of pressure from Trump helped, too: “We all see his tweets.”

