Congress
Republicans just took ICE spending fights off the table. It won’t end shutdown threats.
Republicans just solved an immediate crisis with a party-line vote to fund immigration enforcement agencies into 2029. But that hardly improves the chances of avoiding a shutdown for the rest of the government.
Lawmakers in both parties say the odds of another federal funding lapse are unimproved, if not heightened, by the GOP’s move to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration and border security efforts for three years through the party-line budget reconciliation process.
The Sept. 30 government shutdown deadline, less than four months away, hits just weeks before the November elections that will determine which party controls the House and Senate next year. This electoral uncertainty was already complicating cross-party negotiations to fund federal agencies.
“It’s not helpful for sure,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, told reporters this week of the GOP’s party-line gambit. “It makes it very difficult for us moving forward.”
The Senate’s top appropriators, who are typically chummy, are at loggerheads over totals for the military and nondefense programs — prompting the cancellation this week of committee markups for the second week in a row.
Republicans’ move to stiff-arm Democrats has further soured negotiations to fund the government and raised concerns of more my-way-or-the-highway ultimatums from members on both sides.
“Does it mean that we avoid a shutdown in that area? Takes care of that,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a senior appropriator, said about removing the need to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol past the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
“But how many other accounts do we have that we could have another kerfuffle?” she continued. “And all of a sudden we now have leverage, because we tried it once — and we pulled the trigger.”
Murkowski voted against the reconciliation bill last week — the only Senate Republican to do so.
It’s widely accepted on Capitol Hill that Congress will pass a stopgap funding bill to keep cash flowing for federal agencies past the midterms.
Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who oversees annual transportation and housing spending, predicted this week that Congress will be crafting a funding patch come September. “I just hope we’re not seriously talking about a potential shutdown again,” he added. “We touched that stove once. It was pretty hot.”
Yet some are predicting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will direct his members to band together to oppose a funding patch, as Democrats did last September in triggering a 43-day government shutdown.
“They do not want appropriation bills. They do want to shut down government,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters about Democrats. “And they think they’re going to take the House and maybe the Senate and can get a better deal then.”
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said Democrats “have made clear they are not willing to work with us” to pass government funding bills. But the Maine Republican also said she doesn’t think her party’s move to fund immigration enforcement through reconciliation “has an effect one way or another” on funding the rest of the government beyond September.
Though ICE and Border Patrol are now funded through September 2029, some Democrats say they are planning to use the dozen annual government funding bills as leverage to demand policy changes and funding cuts at those two agencies.
“I can tell you this: We’re going to try every which way to unfund these agencies,” Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), a member of the Appropriations Committee. “We have 12 bills that we have to pass. We have so many battles — this piece is one of them.”
Democrats had for months been demanding guardrails on Trump’s immigration enforcement activities as a condition of supporting enforcement funding after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January. When talks broke down, Republicans made the decision to act alone.
It’s not just ICE and Border Patrol that control immigration enforcement policy, though. Congress still has to fund the broader operations of DHS each year, including the office of Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who recently told lawmakers he couldn’t commit to following court orders.
“You still have to ultimately deal with the Homeland Security bills, and they’ve refused to rein in a lawless ICE operation,” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a top Democratic appropriator, said in an interview. “That’s not changed.”
Some appropriators are holding out hope that collegiality on the House and Senate funding panels will ultimately prevail, if for no other reason than the margins of the Republican majorities in both chambers depend on it.
“You don’t have to have a master’s in logic to figure out that, at the end of the process, the bills in today’s Congress are going to have a bipartisan flavor,” Womack said, “because the numbers dictate that anybody that thinks otherwise is just simply not being intellectually honest about the situation that we happen to be in.”
After Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) proposed the idea this week of funding other controversial agencies through party-line reconciliation bills, House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole immediately rejected the idea floated by one of his subcommittee chairs.
“We’re not doing that. I will just tell you flat out, that will not happen,” the Oklahoma Republican told reporters.
He also refuted the idea that the $70 billion party-line immigration enforcement package could be attractive for his colleagues to replicate going forward.
“I don’t think it’s a precedent,” Cole said. “But if it became a regular practice, I certainly wouldn’t be supporting it.”
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley rescheduled a planned vote on Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general late Friday in a preemptive move as negotiations between the Trump administration and GOP holdouts continue.
The vote, now set for Tuesday after a scheduled Thursday vote was postponed, isn’t an indication that a deal allowing for Blanche’s confirmation is near, so much as it is a nod to Judiciary Committee rules that require three days of notice for a panel meeting.
There is no sign that President Donald Trump is about to acquiesce to the unflinching demands of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who wants a controversial settlement agreement between Trump and the IRS substantially pared back.
Cornyn, who lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed candidate, wants the Justice Department to nullify a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and limit the scope of a tax audit immunity component of the pact.
Trump told reporters earlier Friday the fund is “dead” but added “I wish it weren’t.”
“I’d like to see them compensated,” he added, referring to people he considers victims of government abuse, including participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
To advance Tuesday, Blanche needs to pick up Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), another senator on the panel with similar concerns. He can’t lose any GOP votes if he wants to be reported favorably out of the Judiciary Committee.
“Chairman Grassley wants Todd Blanche’s nomination to be successful,” said a Judiciary Committee spokesperson, who declined to be named. “Noticing the markup gives more time for the White House to secure the votes for the President’s nominee. Grassley would like to see Blanche confirmed before the August recess as he has an excellent record restoring law and order and keeping Americans safe.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is zeroing in on one of House Republicans’ biggest contests — a purple district in Nebraska — when he starts his recess campaign sprint.
Scalise will travel to Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District in the Omaha area for an event with Republican Brinker Harding in the coming days, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter granted anonymity to share plans not yet made public. Republicans are digging in to defend the seat, which Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential race and is among Democrats’ best pick up opportunities this fall as they seek to flip the House.
Harding is running against Democratic consultant Denise Powell to replace retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon. Bacon, a moderate-leaning Republican, flipped the Omaha district red in 2016.
After Nebraska, Scalise is planning to travel across the country throughout August, including to defend GOP incumbents Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ and Zach Nunn’s key battleground seats in Iowa’s 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts and Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District.
He’ll boost candidates working to flip blue districts like Laurie Buckhout in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Derek Merrin in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District and Mike LiPetri in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.
Scalise also plans to travel to Michigan, Colorado, South Carolina and Texas for campaign events over the August recess.
President Donald Trump goaded John Cornyn on social media Friday morning, accusing the Texas senator of withholding his vote on Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination in retaliation for Trump’s central role in his political demise.
Cornyn, who lost his May primary to Texas’ scandal-ridden attorney general, the Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton, has threatened to block Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee until the White House promises to permanently shelve its $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” in writing — something Trump appears unwilling to do.
“John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called “Fund,” which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas, who easily won the Nomination for the United States Senate,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Several Republicans bristled at the fund, which could have been deployed to compensate Americans who faced charges after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and which gives the president and his family audit immunity over taxes. At his July confirmation hearing, Blanche said that the fund, part of a settlement the president reached with the IRS, was defunct. But the administration has been “reluctant to change” the text of the settlement, Cornyn told reporters Thursday.
Trump signaled his continued support for the Jan 6 rioters on Friday.
“I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!” he wrote. “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed.”
On Thursday, the president suggested that he could punt a Senate vote on Blanche until after Cornyn — and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) — leaves the chamber at the end of the year. Cornyn, however, suggested on social media that there are other Republican senators with concerns about the fund.
“After the midterms, who knows who’s going to be the next United States senator from North Carolina or Texas?” Cornyn told reporters.
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