Could enhanced FIRST STEP Act get more than 90 votes in the Senate if even brought up for a vote?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this Hill piece from late Friday headlined "Sentencing reform deal heats up, pitting Trump against reliable allies." Here are excerpts (with emphasis added):

Negotiations on a criminal justice reform bill are pitting President Trump against some of his closest allies on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent a public warning shot to the White House this week, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Trump should not support a “jailbreak” by reducing mandatory minimum sentences. “That foolish approach is not criminal justice reform. … [It would] undercut President Trump’s campaign promise to restore law and order,” Cotton wrote.

Besides Cotton, other reliable allies of the White House, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), are opposing the administration’s approach, which would combine a House-passed prison reform bill with changes to sentencing and mandatory minimums that have wide, bipartisan support in the Senate.

Supporters say completing the bill would give the administration a needed win heading into November's midterm elections. Cotton argues it would make Trump and the GOP look weak on crime.

White House officials and supporters of a deal have been talking with Republican holdouts to try to convince them to back the proposed compromise, which they say would add roughly four sentencing reform provisions into the House bill, which currently focuses on recidivism and not sentencing laws. The pending agreement is expected to add into the House bill lower mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug convictions and more exceptions for judges on applying mandatory minimums. It would also let judges avoid doubling up on convictions for drug offenders facing simultaneous charges, and retroactively apply the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which is aimed at reducing the disparity between cocaine- and crack-related offenses.

A senior White House official said they had received largely positive feedback and have 30 to 32 locked down “yes” votes among Republican senators. The official offered hope that the number of GOP supporters could eventually grow as many as 40 to 46. “We're hopeful that we'll be able to bring everybody together to get this to a place where we have ... most of the Republicans ready to vote for it,” the official said...

Supporters are moving forward and trying to build support within the GOP conference, signaling they view Cotton as a surmountable outlier. “I view it like the handful of people who are trying to obstruct are kind of giving it their best shot and, again, at the end of the day, I think facts usually overcome scare tactics,” the senior White House official said.

If Cotton’s op-ed was meant to build opposition to the potential deal within the Senate Republican Conference, officials suggested it appeared to have backfired. The senior White House official said that nearly a dozen Republican senators had reached out in wake of the Wall Street Journal article to say they didn’t agree with Cotton. A second White House official confirmed the outreach.

But opposition from a small, but vocal, group of critics has been a years-long roadblock for criminal justice reform in the Senate, where GOP leadership has been reluctant to put a spotlight on intra-caucus fights.

In addition to Cotton, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) threatened to do everything within their power to block a 2015 criminal justice reform bill, which had the support of the White House. Hatch has since come on board with criminal justice legislation, and Sessions is now attorney general. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has warned him to “stay out” of the negotiations....

Republicans won’t be able to pass a criminal justice deal on their own. A separate Senate bill, spearheaded by Grassley and Durbin, has the support of 32 senators, including Democrats like Sens. Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). The White House is hoping electoral politics won’t get in the way of them supporting the pending agreement. “[If] people vote against it, I think it would just be really bad vote for them because this bill does a lot of good things,” the senior White House official said of potential Democratic opposition....

Trump held an event on prison reform last week, and at a White House meeting earlier this month signaled support for criminal justice reform. The senior White House official said that while negotiations are ongoing and no final decision has been made, “there is a very strong chance” the president will support the final package.

“[That] means that a lot of the people will want to be with him on it,” the official said. “And again, they know that the president's very tough on crime and if he's supporting something then they know it's not going to be a soft on crime bill.”

But Cornyn appeared skeptical that Trump, despite his deep popularity with GOP voters, would be able to change the dynamics in the Senate. “I don’t think people are going to change their strongly held positions on the sentencing reform part,” he said. “So my goal is to achieve what’s possible."

Riffing on the quote from Senator Cornyn, it seems quite possible that 45 Senators or more from both parties will be inclined to support whatever version of the FIRST STEP Act gets to the floor of the Senate with the President's support.  As I said in a recent post here, and as this article confirms, the problem now is not getting enough votes in support of reform but rather on getting congressional leadership to settle on the particulars of a bill and finally allowing a vote on the Senate floor.

As the GOP heads into a challenging mid-term election, I think and hope that many members would see the FIRST STEP Act as an opportunity to demonstrate bipartisan leadership. And maybe, as he headline of this interesting Bustle article suggest, Prez Trump could have another one of his kids involved in advocacy efforts here: "Tiffany Trump's Georgetown Work Shows She Has An Interest In Criminal Justice Reform Too."  

Some of many prior recent related posts:

• House Judiciary Committee approves FIRST STEP Act by a vote of 25-5 after lots of discussion of amendments
• FIRST STEP Act passes US House of Representatives by vote of 360-59(!), but its fate in Senate remains uncertain
• Interesting new US Sentencing Commission analysis of possible impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017
• Five prominent congressional Democrats write in opposition to federal statutory prison reform without broader sentencing reform
• Prez Trump pledges to sign prison reform that will be "best in the world"
• An (encouraging?) update on the state of federal criminal justice reform in US Senate
• Disconcerting update on Senate's (lack of) progress on federal statutory criminal justice reforms
• Large group of former prisoners urge Senate leaders to move forward with FIRST STEP Act
• Intriguing comments about the politics and persons around FIRST STEP Act and federal criminal justice reform efforts
• An interesting political pitch for the FIRST STEP Act 
• Encouraging news from DC about prospects for prison reform with sentencing reform getting enacted in 2018
• White House emails "startling facts about America’s prison system"
• Could a version of the FIRST STEP Act with sentencing reforms pass the Senate in a matter of weeks?
• FAMM provides detailed review of SRCA sentencing provisions most likely to be added to FIRST STEP Act
• Senator Cotton delivers faulty arguments to prop up faulty federal sentencing system
• Will Trump White House soon "deploy its assets ... to stump" for federal criminal justice reform? It may be critical.