Senate Republicans will release a budget blueprint on Tuesday that will tee up a filibuster-proof process for funding immigration enforcement agencies through the remainder of President Trump’s term amid a Democratic blockade.
Adopting a budget resolution is the first step in the reconciliation process that Republicans are using to get around a Democratic filibuster. The Senate could take a first procedural vote on the measure as soon as Tuesday evening, with the goal of sending it to the House by the end of the week.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, said Monday the budget resolution will direct the two Senate committees with jurisdiction over immigration enforcement — the Homeland Security and Judiciary panels — to draft legislation providing the funding boost.
Some GOP lawmakers are pushing to add other party priorities to the budget reconciliation package, believing it may be their last opportunity to deliver promises they made to voters ahead of the midterm elections.
“I would like to attempt one or two other things in the reconciliation bill that Republicans can unite around,” said Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican, on Saturday on Fox News.
He said one of those priorities is the SAVE America Act, a GOP bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot.
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Mr. Thune said the budget is “narrowly crafted” to ensure U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection are funded “well into the future.”
He said he is open to hearing his colleagues’ ideas about what else they want to include, but that any potential additions would need near-unanimous Republican support to clear the narrow Senate and House majorities.
“And in this environment, that’s going to be challenging, to say the least,” Mr. Thune said.
Mr. Kennedy said two or three Senate Republicans may oppose the addition of the SAVE America Act, but they can afford that many defections.
The greater challenge is rewriting that legislation to comply with the budget reconciliation rules, which require policy changes to have more than a “merely incidental” impact on federal spending or revenues.
Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, has committed to attempting such a rewrite of key SAVE America Act provisions to include in a second reconciliation package later this year. He has said it will also focus on combating fraud in federal welfare programs.
Mr. Thune said members of his conference have floated “good ideas” on how to save money from waste, fraud and abuse, but that a second reconciliation package this year is not a certainty.
“I can’t at this point, again, make any guarantees, obviously,” he said. “Because as we think about what that might look like, we got to think about can we achieve success. And that’s going to come down to where the votes are.”
The immediate goal for Mr. Thune is to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that started on Feb. 14 when stopgap funding lapsed.
The Trump administration approved an executive order a few weeks ago to pay employees who had been working without compensation after Republican leaders announced their two-step plan to fund DHS.
The first step was a partial DHS appropriations bill funding most agencies except for ICE and the border patrol functions of CBP.
The Senate passed that bill, but the House has yet to take it up as Republicans in the lower chamber want to first ensure the immigration enforcement agencies are funded through reconciliation.
Democrats have repeatedly filibustered a full DHS funding bill after federal immigration enforcement agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January, saying they would not approve more money for ICE or border patrol agents without guardrails on their operations.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer slammed Republicans’ plan to use budget reconciliation to pump tens of billions of dollars into those agencies “without any reforms at all, while doing absolutely nothing to lower costs for hardworking Americans.”
“In a well-functioning Congress, the majority focuses on solving people’s problems, not constantly cleaning up their own messes and shoveling tens of billions more into unaccountable rogue agencies,” the New York Democrat said.
