“It’s an interesting question,” McConnell said last Monday. “It’s never been done before.”

But the Senate parliamentarian, as Sen. John Thune told Politico, was “applying a pretty tight filter” to which amendments would be considered “germane” to the resolution. And appealing the parliamentarian’s ruling—i.e., overriding the neutral arbiter’s read of Senate rules—wasn’t a precedent they were looking to set either. The resolution would have to be voted on more or less as they received it from the House.

With the amendment route closed off, some senators, in coordination with Vice President Mike Pence, tried to discuss another deal: Republican senators would vote against the termination resolution if the White House got on board with legislation, introduced this week by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, to amend the National Emergencies Act. Under Lee’s legislation, future emergencies would require an affirmative vote in Congress to proceed beyond 30 days. Under current law, terminating an emergency requires both passage in Congress and a presidential signature, or a legislative veto override.

The talks fell apart on Wednesday, though. Democrats mocked the legislation as “cover” for allowing the current, extremely controversial emergency declaration to stand, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wouldn’t bring it up for a vote in the House. And then Trump, himself, called Lee to reject the idea. It’s not surprising that Trump—or anypresident—would dismiss a piece of legislation transferring power from the executive to the legislative branch. It’s only surprising that some senators thought Trump might not.

The best Trump could offer these antsy senators was a tweet Thursday morning that he might support efforts to update the National Emergencies Act “at a later date.”

The only fence-sitting senator petrified enough for his own political survival to accept this vague reassurance was North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. In an act that the North Carolina Democratic Party might bring up a time or twoduring Tillis’ 2020 re-election campaign, Tillis said on the Senate floor that the tweet was good enough for him. He would vote against the disapproval resolution. Yes, this is the same Thom Tillis who wrote an op-ed several weeks ago explaining his constitutional duty to block Trump’s maneuver, just as he had argued against various executive actions taken by President Barack Obama. Tillis’ fire sale of his vote to Trump might have had something to do with the active recruitment for primary challengers against him in North Carolina.

Tillis isn’t the only senator who was doomed no matter which decision he made. Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, the most vulnerable Republican up for re-election this cycle, voted to uphold the president’s emergency. That will help him through the primary while worsening his general election position. The same goes for Arizona Sen. Martha McSally and Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, whose only realelectoral threat wouldbe in a primary, voted with the president as well. It’s a sensible political choice, so long as he recognizes that he can never semi-plausibly deliver pious lectures again. Same goes for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. It was these individual choices, each of which will have lingering electoral repercussions, that McConnell had tried to shield his caucus from having to make. It was why the senators went so far as to interrupt Trump’s dinner.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the purpose of being in the Senate majority is to set up votes on matters of consequence, like whether the president has the authority to steal money to fulfill a political promise. It’s not. The purpose of being in the Senate majority is to set up gotcha votes that unify your caucus and split the other side, providing fodder for the next campaign season. Here, because of the forced voting mechanism in the national emergency statute, the roles were reversed.

McConnell is eager to get back to the way it’s supposed to be. As soon as the vote on the disapproval resolution passed, the majority leader teed up the chamber’s next vote for when it returns from recess: S.J. Res. 8, more commonly known as the Green New Deal. When the Senate is back, it will be Democrats’ turn to squirm over a politically fraught vote. For vulnerable Republicans, though, it won’t erase the one that was taken on Thursday.

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• National Emergency