Congress is back in town from their two-week Easter recess and Senate Republicans are trying to execute on a second reconciliation package as Congress continues to be consumed by a 58-day Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown, resignations and potential Democratic-led war powers votes.<\/p>\n
As Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) explained it on Monday night, leadership is hoping to keep the reconciliation package \u201cvery, very skinny \u2014 anorexic-like skinny.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTo execute on it and do it with any kind of speed, you\u2019ve got to keep it really tight,\u201d Thune told reporters Monday night.<\/p>\n
The plan is for the reconciliation package to include three-years of funding for only Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) \u2014 without any offsets. That plan reportedly was approved by President Donald Trump last week.<\/p>\n
On paper, that\u2019s a smart move to bring the Republican caucuses \u2014 which hold members from a wide range of ideological backgrounds \u2014 together, in both the lower and upper chamber and pass the funding with a simple majority, as allowed by the reconciliation process. But the reality may not be that simple.<\/p>\n
Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and House are already indicating they want more from the process than just ICE and CBP funding. Leadership is worried about the package becoming a GOP wish list.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each addition to appease individuals would drag out the already-lengthy process, possibly even setting up its failure if the Republican Party cannot come to a consensus on what should be included in their own party-line package. President Trump already called on<\/a> Republicans to pass their second reconciliation bill \u201cno later than June 1st.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf he starts making deals with individual senators \u2026 then he\u2019ll have an avalanche on his hands,\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cI know a number of senators who will take a run at Thune and say, \u2018Look, you\u2019ll only get my vote if you include my stuff in it.\u2019 Well, if he starts that, then I\u2019ve got some of my own stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy said if Thune is going to engage with a free-for-all, then he would like to see part of the SAVE America Act included in the reconciliation package.<\/p>\n Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said he wants to make sure the reconciliation package includes money for the military and other GOP priorities, per Politico.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said he wants to make sure Republicans offset any funding they include in the package. Scott, at least publicly, is not convinced by the argument that Republicans don\u2019t need to offset the funding in the package because it only contains funding that is normally a part of the appropriations process.<\/p>\n \u201cI can understand the argument but I think we ought to pay for everything,\u201d Scott said. \u201cWe\u2019re running $2 trillion deficits.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, the rules of reconciliation do not require<\/a> them to offset the cost of any increased spending within the budget window, which is usually a 10 year period, but Scott is one of a handful of Republicans who likes to jump at any chance to talk about the need for cuts \u2014 usually to the social safety net \u2014 to chip away at the deficit.\u00a0<\/p>\n But in the 2025 GOP reconciliation package, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill, Scott voted to increase the deficit by more than $4 trillion<\/a>, according to the Congressional Budget Office\u2019s (CBO) estimates<\/a>.<\/p>\n Across the Capitol, some House Republicans are also pushing back on Senate GOP leadership\u2019s vision for an \u201canorexic\u201d reconciliation package.<\/p>\n \u201cWell \u2013 he isn\u2019t the only voice in this, is he?\u201d Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said on social media<\/a>, referring to Thune\u2019s remarks. \u201cIsolating DHS was stupid. Isolating ICE\/CBP is worse. We should move other priorities with ALL of DHS\u2026 we\u2019re running out of time to deliver and to clean up these repeated swamp messes.\u201d<\/p>\n Senate Republicans worked with Democrats last month to pass a bill and restore funding to all of DHS except ICE and CBP, but House Republican leadership refused to put the measure up for a vote<\/a> in the House. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) later made a deal with<\/a> Thune and agreed to join the Senate deal. But House leadership is still refusing to bring the bill that would reopen DHS to the floor until they make some progress in funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Congress is back in town from their two-week Easter recess and Senate Republicans are trying to execute on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[142],"tags":[5735,2987,18438,492,475,50,5233,18439],"class_list":["post-26939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-john-thune","tag-cbp","tag-funding","tag-house-gop","tag-ice","tag-john-thune","tag-news","tag-reconciliation","tag-senate-gop"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116404664611709140","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}