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Capitol agenda: No shutdown deal in sight

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Senators are scrambling to avoid a partial government shutdown later this week after Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by a federal agent has members of both parties debating what guardrails they can place on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

There’s no deal in sight.

The Homeland Security appropriations measure is a part of a multi-bill funding package the House sent over to the Senate last Thursday before leaving town for recess, and which the Senate now must clear before 12:01 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 31 — or spark funding lapses across multiple agencies. Making changes to any portion of that package at this point would jeopardize its chances for being signed into law in time.

But recent developments in Minnesota have Democrats calling for changes to the DHS measure. Among their list of demands are requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, mandating federal agents identify themselves, requiring DHS to cooperate with state and local investigations and limiting the “mission creep of federal agencies.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants the DHS bill stripped out of the larger funding package entirely and renegotiated.

Republicans are reluctant to engage, taking the first step Monday to set up an initial vote on the package Thursday. Instead, GOP senators are dangling alternatives that would let them avoid having to tweak the package at the eleventh hour, floating new potential executive actions or a commitment to passing a separate piece of legislation that would address shared priorities.

Democrats aren’t biting. Many believe they have leverage as Americans recoil at the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere. Plenty of Democrats are also skeptical the administration can be trusted to bring accountability to DHS operations or that standalone legislation reining in the department would ever make it through the House.

“My options are to do nothing or to recognize that two U.S. citizens were recently … executed by federal agents,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told reporters Monday. “We need to at least bring some level of pressure on DHS or on our Republican colleagues to explain to the American public why we are going to continue funding this without any changes.”

Democrats are also increasingly calling for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s impeachment amid the fallout. Noem will testify March 3 for an oversight hearing before Senate Judiciary, according to an aide for Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), where questions about her leadership are sure to arise.

Senate Republicans could still have the upper hand. A group of conservatives, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), is vowing to oppose any effort to strip out DHS funding. And due to the time crunch ahead of Friday’s shutdown deadline, a single senator can block an attempt to quickly amend the legislation.

Privately, many Republicans believe any off-ramp will need to come from the White House, anyway, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose private thinking — and the administration said Monday it wants to see the funding package passed as written.

Over in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership circle is still weighing its options but there are no plans to bring the chamber back early from recess, according to three people granted anonymity to comment on private planning.

Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

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Congress

The AI threat undercutting the White House’s FISA push

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The growing power of artificial intelligence is driving new worries among both Republicans and Democrats about government agencies’ warrantless purchases of Americans’ sensitive data. And it’s complicating efforts to renew a federal spying law before it expires — including as House GOP leaders struggle to cobble together support for passage Wednesday a clean, 18-month reauthorization, per President Donald Trump’s wishes.

The federal government has long used commercially available information bought from data brokers for national security, military operations and criminal investigations, bypassing constitutional restrictions on what kinds of information agencies can gather on Americans directly. But agencies’ surveillance capabilities were limited by the vast amount of labor and expertise required to analyze millions of data points.

Now, though, AI is eroding that barrier, making it possible to parse massive amounts of personal information with ease. That’s causing a bipartisan group of lawmakers to call for requiring agencies to get warrants before making those purchases.

“Artificial intelligence has transformed American industries for the better while enabling an unprecedented capability to glean information from private data, increasing the risk of unconstitutional government overreach,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), a co-sponsor on the Government Surveillance Reform Act, saidin a statement.

Her bill would require federal agencies to get a warrant when buying Americans’ data, and when accessing Americans’ private communications under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

She and other lawmakers are also calling for Congress to insist on privacy safeguards before it reauthorizes Section 702’s surveillance capabilities, which were meant to collect data from non-U.S. citizens but have been used to investigate Americans without a warrant. The Trump administration and Speaker Mike Johnson want to reauthorize the law without changes before it expires Monday. Some lawmakers fear AI will enhance the government’s surveillance capabilities, pointing at how intelligence agencies have used Section 702’s authority toobtain data from Black Lives Matter protesters and political donors.

“Passing FISA 702 without strong new guardrails, while doing nothing to stop the government from buying Americans’ location data and feeding it into AI systems to conduct unprecedented mass surveillance, would be shocking negligence,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement.

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Capitol agenda: Cory Mills under fire but not going anywhere

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You may hear House members calling for his ouster after the resignations of Reps. Tony Gonzales and Eric Swalwell, but Rep. Cory Mills looks to be on solid footing.

Despite months of scrutiny over a range of conduct issues — including accusations of illicit involvement in federal contracts and stolen valor — members of both parties say the circumstances are different for the Florida Republican.

Republicans and Democrats are leaning on bureaucratic rationalizations before leaping to a fresh wave of expulsions, despite growing alarm around congressional sleaze.

They say they’re waiting for the conclusion of an active House Ethics investigation into Mills before moving to crack down on him — a similar approach they’re taking with Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who is set to hear her formal punishment from Ethics next Tuesday after the panel found her guilty of two dozen counts of misconduct.

“I have a three part test — Has the member admitted to the conduct in question? Has there been a finding by a court? Or has there been a finding by the Ethics Committee?” Republican Rep. Nick LaLota said. “I don’t think that the Mills case meets any of those three criteria.”

“If there’s expulsion votes, if they’re political, I’m not interested,” said Rep. Brad Schneider, the chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. “If they are based on facts established by process, I’m gonna follow the facts.”

Mills said in an interview he had told Speaker Mike Johnson he was “unfairly lumped into this” with Swalwell and Gonzales as well as with Cherfilus-McCormick. Unlike Cherfilus-McCormick, he is not facing a federal indictment. And unlike Swalwell and Gonzales, he is not facing charges of sexual misconduct — something Mills said Johnson has acknowledged.

It’s not clear where the investigation into Mills stands. Johnson told reporters Tuesday he is “looking into” it. Republicans have quietly worried about the accusations against Mills for some time, but the GOP’s narrow House majority has complicated the prospect of leadership engaging in any sort of accountability.

What else we’re watching:

— FISA lives to face its next test: Johnson is figuring out how to move forward with a clean, 18-month extension of a key spy power — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act— as several Republicans plan to vote against a procedural step up for consideration Wednesday. Talks are ongoing between GOP leaders, hard-liners and the White House as the program faces an April 20 expiration.

— Sanders to Force Israel Arms Sales Vote: Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to force a vote Wednesday on two resolutions to block nearly half a billion dollars in U.S. arms sales to Israel. There’s renewed energy behind Sanders’ push as Democrats separately try to rein in Trump’s power to continue the Israel-US war in Iran.

—Vought’s Budget Pitch: White House budget chief Russ Vought is set to defend Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request when he appears at House Budget Wednesday. Meanwhile House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers said Tuesday he expects to craft defense policy legislation with a $1.15 trillion budget topline, a move that could make the upcoming NDAA more politically palatable to Democrats.

Riley Rogerson and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

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GOP leaders struggle to keep $75B immigration plan narrow

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Senate Republicans plan to forge ahead next week with the first formal steps to pass a party-line immigration enforcement bill totaling $65 billion to $75 billion.

But as GOP leaders scramble to meet President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline to clear a bill funding ICE and Border Patrol for more than three years, they are facing competing visions within their ranks for what else should be tacked on as the party runs out of time to score more legislative wins before the midterms.

“I think this is it. This is our shot,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday, predicting that Republicans would not end up enacting a third filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation bill before Election Day.

“And that’s why you sense some frustration among a lot of the senators,” he added. “Some of which has been voiced and a lot of which it hasn’t.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune laid out the up-to $75 billion price tag for the bill to reporters Tuesday. The bill’s topline was in the range of what Republicans had been telegraphing over the past week but could spark pushback from at least one fiscal hawk — Senate Homeland Security Chair Rand Paul — because it’s higher than the roughly $50 billion it would cost to fund immigration enforcement at current levels for three years.

The worry among some senior Republicans is that expanding the scope of the bill will slow down the process and complicate the measure’s chances of passing. Instead, they want to simply fund the immigration enforcement agencies not covered under the Senate-passed measure House Republicans are still waiting to clear, two months after funding first lapsed for all of the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the immigration agencies.

“We have members who want other things. I mean, I want other things,” Thune said Tuesday afternoon. “But obviously we have a specific mission and purpose here.”

Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) is expected to release the budget resolution as soon as this week to set the general framework for the final package.

Senate GOP leaders are encouraging Republican senators to offer their ideas as amendments during the chamber’s marathon “vote-a-rama” debate, during which lawmakers are allowed to offer as many germane amendments as they wish.

“There was some suggestion that it ought to be a little broader and everything. I think that’s where the default position is, ‘Then put it in an amendment, and we’ll see if it can pass,’” West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the No. 4 Senate Republican, told reporters Tuesday afternoon.

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said Tuesday the chamber intends to vote “next week” on approving the fiscal blueprint that will allow them to later pass the party-line immigration enforcement bill.

Thune can lose three of his own members and still win on the floor with Vice President JD Vance as the tie-breaking vote, and Republicans are cautiously optimistic they will have the votes next week.

But some fiscal hawks aren’t yet backing down from their demand that the immigration enforcement bill be paid for, which could broaden the scope of the measure as well as the number of issues where Democrats could force tricky amendment votes.

Even if Senate Republicans succeed in adopting the budget framework next week, an identical budget measure also needs to clear the House. GOP hard-liners rejected the Senate’s last attempt to end the DHS shutdown and are now demanding that Republicans use the party-line reconciliation process to fund all of the department.

Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson had been expected to hold a weekly meeting Tuesday where they would discuss the path forward on DHS funding, among other issues. But Thune said the sitdown was punted to Wednesday because of scheduling issues.

Mia McCarthy and Calen Razor contributed to this report.

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