The News
Republicans are trapped in a messy fight over their pre-election agenda that will extend the longest government shutdown of all time and threatens to complicate an already tough midterm campaign.
President Donald Trump’s party has a dizzying to-do list for the year: restore Department of Homeland Security funding, send him billions of dollars more for immigration enforcement, meet his demand for a voter ID bill, extend key surveillance powers, and replenish Pentagon coffers depleted by war in Iran.
Passing those priorities will require muscle from Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune. But the House is still sitting on the Senate-passed bill reopening most of DHS, because they want Thune’s Republicans to advance a standalone immigration enforcement bill.
Except that House and Senate Republicans also can’t agree on whether to sidestep Democrats only on ICE and CBP funding until 2028, or whether to try to fund all of DHS for that long.
Add in the other huge political challenges on their list — including potential farm and disaster aid — and Trump’s party seems to break at the seams over strategy. Conservatives are remarkably candid when it comes to the inability of the filibuster-protection tactic known as budget reconciliation to achieve the lofty goals most Republicans share.
“Americans should not accept vague promises of future action to cover for inaction today,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the party’s biggest advocates for the voter ID bill known as SAVE America, told Semafor.
“We have explored every possible avenue to pass the SAVE America Act, and unfortunately the reconciliation process simply won’t work,” Lee added. “The only way this legislation lands on President Trump’s desk is if we beat a Democrat talking filibuster, which is my first preference, or nuke it entirely.”
Senate GOP leaders have underscored that they don’t have the votes to quash the filibuster. Right now they’re eyeing a simple party-line reconciliation bill that only funds ICE and CBP. Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Budget Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will meet with Trump on Friday to discuss that legislation.
Barrasso told reporters on Thursday that “the goal is to do it in a targeted way, focused, and get it done fast.”
That plan will probably end the shutdown but wouldn’t address the Pentagon’s forthcoming request for tens of billions more in funding. Democrats say they won’t support a bipartisan path for that money, given the Trump administration’s lack of engagement on the Iran war.
Given the schisms, some in the GOP believe only a single party-line bill may end up passing before November. So House Republicans are bracing for a flurry of attempts to tack on more, including the voter ID and citizenship verification bill.
A single reconciliation attempt would also kick some of the party’s priorities further down the line. Graham hasn’t given up, saying he’d like to make a “down payment” on the voter ID bill with a grant program for states that clear voter rolls of noncitizens as part of an additional party-line spending bill later this fall.
Conservatives like Lee are pushing back by saying such a move is not a substitute for actually passing binding legislation to require proof of citizenship and photo ID for voting.
Know More
Republicans have a theoretical agreement on ending the now-54-day DHS closure. Congress’ two-week recess, however, has seen no tangible movement on that due to the dispute between the House and Senate GOP.
House Republicans are still reluctant to take up any DHS legislation that doesn’t include money for immigration enforcement agencies. Rank-and-file GOP lawmakers want to wait to see progress in the Senate on a party-line reconciliation bill to fund DHS.
“I would hope that we would fund it all,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., on Thursday. Blaming Democrats, he likened the Senate’s bill exempting ICE and CBP to a “defund the police mentality. They are police.”
Still, some of the urgency for lawmakers to pay DHS employees was alleviated by Trump’s executive order to keep paychecks coming during the partial shutdown using funds from last year’s tax cut law. It’s still unclear how long DHS could be paid with those funds — but with hours-long TSA lines at airports subsiding, pressure on lawmakers to act is temporarily low.
And Republicans still don’t have a plan for how to fund a Pentagon whose resources are strained by war. Congress is still waiting for a request from the Trump administration, but Democrats say the GOP will have to go it alone.
“I just find this to be absolutely appalling, that I cannot, as a United States senator, get information about an ongoing war that is happening. Meanwhile, the Pentagon wants to ask me and others for $200 billion. Absolutely no,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., on Thursday.
That could mean that the GOP Congress would have to consider a third reconciliation bill in the fall with more of the party’s priorities, or make its spring effort bigger.
Not to mention that a pivotal government surveillance law for metadata collection will expire on April 20, and GOP leaders are still working to wrangle votes.
Room for Disagreement
Barrasso said the Senate plans to coordinate closely with the House and played down the divides. He blamed Democrats for “shutting down a portion of the government that has to do with national security.
“We need to do it through the House and through the Senate, get it to the White House, and I’ll be discussing those things with the president tomorrow,” Barrasso said.
The View From Democrats
Democrats spent months waging a shutdown fight in hopes of getting more restrictions of Trump’s immigration enforcement after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minnesota. Now they are watching Republicans end-around them entirely, with no policy victories and the potential to remove their future leverage.
“It’ll be very clear for the American people to see that this is the Republicans’ plan, and that these are their priorities at a time when Americans are really struggling,” Kim said. “If the Republicans want to go around the American people, then they will answer to the American voter in November.”
Burgess and Nicholas’ View
There are more than six months before the election, but in legislative terms, time is already running short for Republicans to achieve everything they say needs to be done.
Democrats did pass their second party-line bill of the Congress in August 2022, but that’s an exception to the rule that big bills don’t pass close to the midterms.
It’s pretty hard for me to imagine the GOP passing two more party-line bills this year. Each one requires passage of a budget, as well as enduring two unlimited “vote-a-ramas” in the Senate and requiring intense deliberations to make it comply with strict budget rules.
In other words: It’s fair to doubt that Republicans can do everything they want to. When they will acknowledge that is another question.
Eleanor Mueller contributed to this report.