Congress
Republicans want to go it alone on ICE funding. It might be a slippery slope.
If last year’s Republican megabill served as Congress’ gateway drug to party-line government funding, the GOP’s latest spending plan makes clear it was habit-forming.
Nine months ago, Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to skirt a Democratic filibuster and enact more than $280 billion for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. It shattered conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill that reconciliation’s special power couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be used to circumvent the across-the-aisle work Congress does each year to fund federal agencies.
Now President Donald Trump has given congressional Republicans until June 1 to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an entire government agency — through a partisan process that won’t require a single Democratic vote. Republicans are also mulling whether to fund a war in the Middle East that same way, with the White House considering a $200 billion request for supplemental funding for the Pentagon.
Republicans say this is happening because Democrats refuse to back a full Department of Homeland Security funding measure without adding guardrails on immigration enforcement activities the GOP finds intolerable, leading to the current record-breaking shutdown. Democrats also are unlikely to support giving the Trump administration additional dollars to bolster its military presence in Iran.
“Democrats have put us where we are, and we have to deal with it,” Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, a senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters Monday. “We don’t have a choice.”
But Hoeven also acknowledged it could be a slippery slope. Asked whether he was worried about setting a new precedent, he conceded, “Me, as an appropriator? Yeah.”
Democrats previously used their own party-line bills during the Biden administration to fund programs opposed by Republicans, such as an $80 billion infusion for IRS tax enforcement. But that was in addition to the funding agencies received through regular appropriations, not as a substitute for it.
Democrats are pushing back on the idea they are responsible for the GOP’s go-it-alone approach — and they are warning about dire consequences.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a senior appropriator, said it would be “a tragic mistake” for Republicans to bankroll a war while sidelining their minority party colleagues.
Enacting funding through reconciliation, Coons said, “requires no compromise with the other party. And if that becomes the sole way we fund the core functions of government, that is a bad idea.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune suggested Thursday that the fallout from the current funding fight could have long-term implications, warning that it’s “not good for the country or for the future of the appropriations process or, for that matter, the future of the Senate.”
It’s just the latest blow to bipartisan norms of the congressional appropriations process during Trump’s second term. White House budget director Russ Vought has executed a playbook for undercutting cross-party funding negotiations, and Republican leaders have gone along with those tactics, including the stopgap funding patch that riled Democrats last spring and the enactment of a clawbacks package last summer that canceled billions of dollars Congress previously cleared with bipartisan support.
Many Republicans aren’t happy with how the latest step is unfolding, with top GOP appropriators especially concerned about funding a war effort without Democratic buy-in.
“I would prefer not to,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said late last month about clearing an emergency military package through the party-line process. But, he added, “we’ll wait and see. A lot of that depends on what the Democrats want to do.”
Three Hill Republican aides, granted anonymity to speak candidly, privately forecasted that the current funding breakdown will fuel a tit-for-tat future for the appropriations process. The worry is that Republican presidents will routinely be forced to use reconciliation to clear immigration enforcement funding through Congress, and Democratic presidents will have to use it to fund nondefense efforts GOP leaders are less keen on boosting.
Republicans are now exploring enacting immigration enforcement funding for the remainder of Trump’s presidency — not just the current fiscal year.
Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security funding panel, said a future Congress under Democratic control could follow the GOP’s example and use reconciliation to fund agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Health and Human Services.
“So I certainly have concerns with a bad precedent that they will be setting,” Cuellar said in an interview Thursday.
Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, said “the big deal here” is “shoving the dysfunctional discretionary stuff into reconciliation.”
“Because of the ability to do party-line legislating in the reconciliation bills, it allows a back door to party-line discretionary appropriating,” he said in an interview.
Glassman also sees the creeping use of reconciliation as a way to sidestep mutually negotiated guardrails on spending. Limitations on use of money, and how much time agencies have to spend it, are longtime hallmarks of bipartisan funding negotiations.
“If you throw money into these bills, then you lose sort of the control aspect that they love to put into the appropriations with the limitation provisions,” Glassman said.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said last week that Democrats’ refusal to fund the Border Patrol or ICE without major policy changes “sets a precedent that they may one day come to regret.”
Other senior congressional appropriators contend that the bipartisan agreements Collins helped broker in recent months are proof that the annual funding process is working and that reconciliation is not a workable alternative. Despite the DHS drama, Congress managed to approve more than $1.6 trillion for every other federal department following a 43-day government shutdown last fall.
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s leading Democratic appropriator, said in a statement this week that “reconciliation will never be a substitute for the appropriations process.”
“Republicans must realize our country is safer and stronger when government funding decisions are made by both Democrats and Republicans in the House and in the Senate,” she added.
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
GOP lawmakers believe Sen. Mitch McConnell will return to the Capitol this week, ending a three-month health-related absence, according to four people granted anonymity to disclose private conversations.
McConnell’s office is keeping silent about the 84-year-old former Republican leader’s intentions since disclosing last month that he had returned home following weeks in the hospital and rehab. But expectations about a return to the Senate have grown among fellow Kentucky Republicans and his GOP colleagues in the Senate.
The senator’s staff has told senior Republicans that he will be back at the Capitol in time for a Wednesday committee vote on the farm bill, which stalled earlier this summer amid his absence, according to three other people with direct knowledge of the matter who were also granted anonymity.
His vote is needed to get the GOP-written farm bill out of the Agriculture Committee after Chair John Boozman told Blue Light News that he is intending to have another vote this week.
Asked Sunday about the rising expectations of McConnell’s return, a spokesperson pointed back to an August statement that said he would be doing physical therapy from home during the Senate’s five-week summer recess. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McConnell attending the Agriculture Committee meeting.
McConnell has not voted in person since his office announced on June 14 that he had been hospitalized, but the lack of details had fueled online conspiracy theories and even calls from some fellow politicians, including Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, for more transparency.
McConnell released a lengthy statement in July explaining that he was initially hospitalized for a fall and later developed pneumonia. He indicated at the time he intended to return to the Senate and serve out the remainder of his term, but he didn’t say when that would happen.
Reporters and social media influencers could be seen Monday morning camped outside McConnell’s Capitol Hill home, watching to see if he leaves for the Senate ahead of a scheduled evening vote.
The AI industry’s promise to slow itself down is “not nearly enough,” Sen. Andy Kim said Monday, calling for a binding federal framework and dismissing President Donald Trump’s argument that new rules would hand the race to China.
Kim (D-N.J.), who sits on the chamber’s commerce committee negotiating AI legislation, told Blue Light News that relying on the “voluntary goodwill” of AI companies to rein in their own technologies is unacceptable, given the potential societal risks involved. And he is not fully sold on a proposal to grant outside evaluators access to the labs developing groundbreaking AI technologies, which the AI company Anthropic recently said it would allow.
“We really need a very specific regulatory framework when it comes to AI,” Kim said in a phone interview. “Yes, embedding evaluators is certainly a part of that, but that is not going to be enough to address my concerns about where this technology is headed. We need much more clarity in terms of what level of standards we would want those evaluators to be upholding.”
Kim’s comments came after an artificial intelligence researcher dramatically resigned last week with warnings of global destruction if unfettered development continues. He also spoke of the need to “Mythos-proof our society,” referring to the powerful model developed by Anthropic, saying that he’s “engaged with a lot of different elements of government” to accomplish that goal but declining to elaborate what that might look like.
As concerns over both AI development and data center construction grow throughout the country, there’s been bipartisan momentum in Congress to rein in the industry, though the most prominent bill to do so remains in limbo with just a few weeks to go before an election-season recess. Kim said he’s lately had “good, bipartisan conversations” with senators about AI policies, and he’s hopeful that the Senate’s commerce committee will hold an AI markup in the coming weeks.
Trump, however, has emerged as a major impediment to any potential progress in Congress. In a Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump wrote that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” referencing the need for the U.S. to remain ahead of China in the AI development race.
Kim, though, argued that’s a false choice: Putting AI regulations in place, he said, does not have to conflict with maintaining competitiveness with China.
“Those are not mutually exclusive,” he said. “And I think that comment by Trump was wrong. We can find bipartisan support to show that there is a real and better way that we can do this.”
Speaker Mike Johnson plans to meet with executives for major artificial intelligence companies as early as the end of this week or early next week, with pressure growing on Congress to set guardrails around the expanding technology.
“It will be soon,” Johnson told reporters Monday of his schedule. “I think either end of this week or early next week. But wait and see.”
The potential meetings come after three CEOs of nation’s leading AI labs — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI — all warned over the weekend that there must be mechanisms put in place to slow down the rapid pace of AI advancements or risk catastrophe as severe as eventual human extinction.
Johnson said he has spoken to Amodei and Altman in the past about AI legislation but not in the past couple of days.
Several lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced bills to address the current lack of federal regulations on the industry but there’s little consensus on if or how to proceed. Johnson, who has previously said the first order of business would be for President Donald Trump and tech executives to “go in a big room, close the door and sort this out,” was still noncommittal Monday on whether the House would vote on AI safety legislation before the midterms.
“This is a very complex issue that requires a lot of work and bipartisan solutions,” Johnson said, adding that each AI platform provider has different ideas for what guardrails should look like.
“We want to emphasize the necessity of them providing safe products and self-regulating,” Johnson said. “There is also a role potentially for Congress to play, but we have to do this with a balanced approach to ensure that we maintain our edge over China.”
Johnson separately noted he would support legislation on the floor Tuesday aimed at forcing tech companies to bear the brunt of rising energy costs associated with data centers — an issue that has taken on urgency amid voter backlash ahead of the November elections.
-
Politics2 years agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
Politics2 years agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words