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President Donald Trump’s nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement package has entered uncertain waters as the Senate embarks on a marathon of votes that could blow up the legislation.
At the heart of the issue is the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) now-defunct nearly $2 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. It’s another rare instance where both sides of the aisle are frustrated with the administration, and it could spell doom for the broader bill.
That’s because Democrats and Republicans are lining up amendments to ensure the fund is dead, to varying degrees.
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Senate Republican leadership is hopeful that they can prevent those amendments from surviving during the newly launched “vote-a-rama,” but success isn’t guaranteed. One positive for the GOP is that every Republican voted for the package in its first procedural hurdle Wednesday afternoon.
“I feel good going into it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said. “But, you know, you got a lot of conversations with our members [who] understand what’s at stake, how critical it is that we defeat amendments that would be corrosive to the bill or undermine in any way its privilege.”
One issue is that should an amendment targeting the fund pass, it could remove the reconciliation package’s ability to advance with just a simple majority of votes. That would effectively give Democrats a win in killing the package outright.
Whether the amendments will be considered under a simple majority or 60-vote threshold could change the landscape and will ultimately be up to the Senate rules referee to determine whether they comply with the Byrd rule, which undergirds the reconciliation process.
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Republicans believed that those add-ons would hit that 60-vote mark, giving them a little bit of breathing room.
“I mean, you never know with 100% accuracy,” Thune said. “There are a lot of creative ways of drafting amendments, but we feel pretty confident that most of those would be at 60.”
The fund, announced last month as part of a settlement between the Trump family and the Internal Revenue Service, received strong pushback from Republicans who feared that without proper guardrails, people convicted of assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill could access the taxpayer funds.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., whose main job is to wrangle and twist the arms of wary Republicans to vote for the package, put the primary blame on Senate Democrats as fractures in the GOP simmered.
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“The Democrats continue to talk about everything they want to talk about, except actually securing the border and protecting the American people,” Barrasso said. “They’re gonna come with all sorts of things, all in an effort to delay our efforts to support the American people and keep them safe and secure.”
But there are Republicans who will have their own anti-weaponization fund amendments. So far, Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., two lawmakers who are increasingly prone to break with Trump, have teed up add-ons to address the fund.
There is the option to deal with the fund outside of reconciliation, too.
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Cassidy, who Trump successfully just ousted from office, didn’t say which route he would prefer, but wanted “something which just makes it sure that somebody doesn’t change their mind in the White House, it doesn’t come back.”
Tillis contended that there were enough Republicans with concerns over the fund that something needed to be done, but wanted it to be a GOP-led initiative. He’s not picky about whether his amendment gets a shot either.
“I don’t care about my own personal amendment,” Tillis said. “There’s a few out there, as long as one touching on the issue gets there. I’m not gonna slow leadership down. I wouldn’t do anything to make it as corrosive to the underlying bill so that it loses privilege. But we gotta do this.”
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