By Thursday night, that legislation with the cash for the wall was on its way to an empty Senate chamber, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell scrambled to get senators back to Washington to vote on a bill that's essentially dead on arrival.
There is a much simpler, albeit much more difficult solution -- get senators to do their job.
How did Johnson get senators, those proud individualists, to follow him?
What else could get Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer of New York, both Democrats, on the same page with Republicans like Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker?
But there goes the Senate, sending Senator Robert L. Duncan, Republican of Lubbock, and a subcommittee of budgeteers on a hunt for "non-tax revenues" that could be used to put enough meat on the skimpy proposed budget to get senators to vote for it.
Mr. McConnell may have been betting that pressure from a majority of Republicans — who have been promising for the better part of a decade to unravel President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy achievement — would get senators from Medicaid expansion states on board to do just that.
