Senate Clears First Hurdle in Funding ICE, Border Patrol for the Remainder of Trump’s Term

Senate Republicans have cleared the first hurdle in funding ICE and Border Patrol for the remainder of President Trump’s term. The shutdown of the agencies has been going on for more than two months after Democrats refused to fund operations without reforms to how deportation agents do their jobs. After a series of amendment votes in the middle of the night, the Senate GOP successfully passed a budget resolution to set up the next step of the funding process. Two Republicans — Senators Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul — voted with all Democrats against the measure. Two vulnerable GOP lawmakers up for re-election this year, Senators Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan, sided with Democrats on a number of amendment votes. The process of reconciliation is different from the typical legislative procedure. In reconciliation, lawmakers can pass legislation by simple majority so long as all parts of the bill deal primarily with spending and revenue, though the House and Senate must first pass identical resolutions to direct committees to begin writing such funding bills. Early Thursday morning, the Senate passed their budget instruction resolutions for the committees on Judiciary and Homeland Security to begin writing those funding measures. The top Democrat on the subcommittee which writes the DHS budget every year, Senator Chris Murphy, had taken the lead in negotiating reforms to ICE, Border Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations following the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year. Ultimately, those talks with the White House went nowhere. “We would be violating our oath of office — all of us — to fund an agency that just doesn’t care about the law,” Mr. Murphy said on the floor before debate began. “I don’t care what your politics are … you should not be willing to fund an agency that just doesn’t care about the law at scale.”Democrats had demanded that DHS agents wear body cameras, show their faces, identify themselves, and get judicial warrants before conducting searches. While the White House was willing to discuss body-worn cameras, the other demands were unacceptable, leading Senator John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson to embrace the reconciliation process instead. The chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, kicked off debate late Wednesday to proclaim that ICE and Border Patrol would be “fully funded through the rest of President Trump’s term so that we can be safe.”“I am sad that we are having to do this, but you gave us no choice,” Mr. Graham said to his Democratic colleagues. “The day that you wanted to put ICE out of business is the day that, as the budget chairman, I and my colleagues acted.”During these late-night amendment sessions — affectionately known as “vote-a-ramas” — lawmakers will typically force votes on contentious policy matters in order to put their colleagues in politically tricky spots. On Wednesday and early Thursday during the vote-a-rama, Democrats did just that. Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat running for re-election in Georgia this year, created a point of order against the bill to highlight how it fails to “address the practice of insurance companies stepping between patients and their doctors to delay or deny access to care.” Three Republicans — Ms. Collins, Mr. Sullivan, and Senator Josh Hawley — voted for that point of order, though it fell far short of the 60 votes needed. Those same three Republican senators also voted for an amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders to codify Mr. Trump’s “most favored nation” drug pricing executive order, which would help bring down drug costs. Again, that amendment fell far short of the 60-vote threshold. Now, the budget instruction resolution must go to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson has a margin of just two votes. Because the ICE and Border Patrol reconciliation bill has no tax increases or spending cuts included, fiscal hawks like Congressman Thomas Massie and others may raise hell about the deficit implications when the chamber returns next week.

Senate Clears First Hurdle in Funding ICE, Border Patrol for the Remainder of Trump’s Term

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