GOP faces another midterm threat as Trump plays the shutdown card

With the election coming just weeks later, the party can ill afford a disruption that voters — already disgusted by Washington dysfunction — may hold the president accountable for.

A shutdown would also distract from Senate Republicans’ main business in September: their push to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“We’re going to have a challenging midterm anyway, and I don’t see how putting the attention on shutting down the government when you control the government is going to help you,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said in an interview…

Republican leaders met with the president last week at the White House to talk about funding for the federal government. They emerged thinking they had a deal to delay the wall funding debate, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, suggested as much on Friday in a radio interview on WHAS in Louisville.