House Conservatives Rage Against Potential DHS Funding Deal Negotiated by Trump, Senate Republicans

Conservative Republicans in Congress are raging against President Trump and their GOP colleagues after a bipartisan deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security comes into view. The compromise, if it becomes a reality, would likely see the SAVE America Act fall by the wayside. Mr. Trump demanded that the SAVE America Act — a bill to require voter ID and proof of citizenship when registering to vote — be attached to any DHS funding bill. On Monday night, Republican senators convinced him to ditch that idea and instead let them bring the bill up through a process known as reconciliation. As part of their compromise to reopen DHS, Republicans are offering to fund all parts of the department except for ICE and its Enforcement and Removal Operations. Democrats, however, have said they need more significant reforms at ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies before they sign on to a deal, meaning that airport security lines are due to remain long for several more days, at least, considering TSA agents are also set to miss another paycheck on Friday. For the SAVE America Act, there are additional problems with trying to pass it through the reconciliation process. That pathway requires that every component of a reconciliation bill must deal primarily with spending and revenue. The SAVE America Act currently includes no significant provisions to deal with the budget or taxes, meaning that it likely will not survive the process to decide what parts of the bill are included in the final piece of legislation. The Senate Parliamentarian and her office decide which components are included. On Tuesday, the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus accused Senate Republicans of engaging in “failure theater” by planning to end the ongoing debate of the SAVE America Act and instead bring it up through the reconciliation process. “Senate Republicans refused to force a talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act because it would have allowed Democrats to offer unlimited amendments,” the Freedom Caucus said in a statement Tuesday. “This is gaslighting. The American people are not stupid and will not accept more failure theater from Republicans in Congress.”The sponsor of the SAVE America Act, Senator Mike Lee, did not mince words in saying that he does not believe his colleagues cannot get the bill passed through the reconciliation process. “It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” Mr. Lee wrote on X. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”A co-sponsor of the bill, Senator Ted Cruz, tells the New York Sun that he is also not terribly optimistic about a reconciliation bill for voting reforms. “I would be eager to do as much as possible and I don’t know how much that is,” he said with a smile. Senator Rick Scott, a conservative from Florida, tells the Sun that he agrees with Mr. Lee on the reconciliation issue. “I talked to Senator Lee about it and he doesn’t see any way” forward, Mr. Scott said. “I think it’s gonna be very hard. We watched the reconciliation process last year with the big beautiful bill, and it ended up being a train where everybody put all their ideas on there.”“I liked the tax cuts, but the rest of it, you know, it was pretty frustrating,” he said of last year’s reconciliation battle, implying that it would be a similar quagmire this time around. In a post on X Tuesday morning, Mr. Scott also lambasted the fact that the compromise likely will not have any money for ICE enforcement and deportation operations. “Anyone who wants my vote on this DHS ‘deal’ needs to tell me how it’s going to ensure ICE agents and everyone at DHS charged with keeping us safe from illegal aliens will get paid,” Mr. Scott said in a statement Tuesday morning. “Any vote that fails to fund the people who keep us safe is a failure to the American people, and it’s putting our families’ safety at risk. I cannot in good conscience support that.”Leading Senate Democrats did not sound entirely enthusiastic about what GOP senators and Mr. Trump are offering. At a press conference Tuesday, Senator Chuck Schumer said that Democrats would not support the current proposal. “This does not have any current reforms,” the minority leader said, adding that he and his colleagues would send Republicans a counteroffer which includes “significant” reforms to ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies. The top Democrat on the subcommittee which writes the DHS budget, Senator Chris Murphy, says not funding ICE’s enforcement operations means nothing when DHS could just use Border Patrol agents or agents from Homeland Security Investigations to carry out detentions. “The distinction between [enforcement operations], HSI, and [Customs and Border Protection] doesn’t matter because they just commingle all of those dollars. So, if you just don’t fund ERO, you’re still funding thousands of unqualified agents all over the country [who are] disobeying the law and terrorizing our communities,” Mr. Murphy told reporters. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense — the proposal they’re making — absent reforms.”

House Conservatives Rage Against Potential DHS Funding Deal Negotiated by Trump, Senate Republicans

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