Senate Republicans hope to nail down the first step of their party-line funding package for immigration operations this week, but other legislative obstacles and divisions could slow the process.
Republicans and President Donald Trump are in agreement that the partisan budget reconciliation process is the key to bypassing Democrats’ blockade of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol funding.
But in order to hit that fast-approaching deadline, Senate Republicans largely want to keep the package as narrowly tailored as possible to avoid any hiccups in the process. The main plan from Republican leadership is to fund immigration operations for the next three years with the current reconciliation package and look to a future bill as a later landing spot for other issues.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will kick off the process with a budget resolution that will act as the guiding document for the GOP as they push forward into reconciliation. That resolution will tee up the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as the main panels running the process.
“I hope we can get moving on it as early as next week,” Graham said before lawmakers left Washington, D.C., for the weekend.
Despite keeping the resolution, in theory, as slim as possible, other lawmakers in the upper chamber and in the House want more added to the package.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told FOX Business’ Larry Kudlow last week that he was making the case that Republicans should “go big” on reconciliation. Cruz said he wants a decade of funding for ICE and Border Patrol and, more broadly, tax cuts and affordability measures.
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“Right now, leadership’s plan is to have the skinny, anorexic bill that just has funding for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. I think that is short-minded, short-sighted,” Cruz said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., reiterated that the forthcoming package would have to “fall within the contours of what we’re trying to do here,” but he acknowledged that other Republicans viewed the current package as a vehicle that could fit several other issues.
“We have another vehicle available, we’ll see, but right now, keep it tight,” he continued. “That’s the plan.”
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Part of the problem with adding more to the package is that more committees would have to get involved, like during the crafting of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which involved every panel in the Senate and House and narrowly survived in the upper chamber.
And House Republicans are on the same page as Cruz — they want to supersize the bill to take advantage of the GOP’s trifecta in Washington, D.C., ahead of the midterm elections in the fall.
It’s a give-and-take between the chambers in their quest to end the longest shutdown in history. House Republicans aren’t keen on passing the Senate’s bill to fund the bulk of DHS, minus funding for ICE and chunks of CBP, until the reconciliation package passes.
But that could further prolong the shutdown, and Republicans in the upper chamber argue that DHS should be reopened while they hammer out the details for funding immigration operations in the background.
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Fox News Digital that adding more to the package would slow down the process.
“Every time you add stuff to it, you add committees of jurisdiction, you add complexity, and you add more time,” Hoeven said. “So if they want it expeditiously, which is what we’re working on right now, then you wouldn’t add stuff, right?”
