House Republicans are in open revolt. GOP lawmakers held a nearly three-hour call Thursday, during which Speaker Mike Johnson pitched them on passing the Senate’s Department of Homeland Security minus ICE and CBP funding bill. That’s the same bill that Johnson called a “joke” a week ago.
Johnson is now telling House Republicans they must accept this bill because the Senate doesn’t have the votes for anything else. That’s proven to be a tough sell. Another problem for House Republicans — the SAVE America Act, which they’ve passed multiple times, is going to end up in reconciliation, leaving it at the mercy of Senate parliamentary rules.
House Republicans now may hold off voting on the DHS funding until the reconciliation process begins. We’ll see what the White House thinks about that. This DHS bill doesn’t have the votes right now — or anywhere close.
Trump vs. the Senate. The Senate is holding — for now.
President Donald Trump’s nonstop lobbying of Senate Republicans to weaken the Senate’s institutional powers is running into a brick wall. There are signs that this reality — even Trump has limits in dealing with the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — may finally be settling in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Thanks to GOP senators’ refusal to blow up the filibuster for the SAVE America Act, Trump tried to impose voting restrictions via executive order this week. Democrats immediately sued to stop him. Plus, as Senate Republicans stood by the Judiciary Committee’s “blue slip” policy, Trump bypassed the Senate by installing some U.S. attorneys, only to later lose in court.
Now, rather than go nuclear on the filibuster in the face of Democratic opposition, Hill Republicans will use reconciliation to fund ICE and CBP for three years. Trump finally embraced the Senate’s DHS funding deal after being forced to go around Congress twice to pay DHS employees amid the never-ending shutdown.
“My job, obviously, is to define reality. And the reality is that it’s not even a close call,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told us when asked about the chances of a successful vote to nuke the filibuster.
Dueling assessments. That doesn’t mean Trump is giving up or will stop nagging Thune over the filibuster or the blue slip. Trump and Thune have diverged, both publicly and privately, on the whip count for triggering the nuclear option, which would require support from at least 50 of the 53 GOP senators.
Trump has said as recently as Sunday that Thune would only be “a couple of votes short” if he wanted to scrap the filibuster. “That’s what being a leader is. You have to get the votes,” Trump added.
There are two problems with this assessment. First, Thune personally doesn’t want to do it. Secondly, Thune believes Trump’s whip count is way off.
“It’s not a handful of three or four Republicans in the Senate,” Thune told us, appearing to reference Trump’s comments. “It is a large number of Senate Republicans who feel very strongly about the filibuster, its role in our democracy, and the role it plays in giving a voice to the minority.”
Thune acknowledged that Democrats’ “obstructionist” tactics on government funding have “intensified the interest in doing something on the filibuster.” Yes, more GOP senators now support getting rid of it than at the start of Trump’s term. But that number is still only around 12 to 15, GOP leadership sources estimate.
This is news. Two top White House officials — legislative affairs chief James Braid and political director James Blair — have been meeting privately with GOP senators in recent months to develop their own whip list, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The implication here is that Trump should know full well just how deep Senate Republicans’ opposition is to going nuclear, even as he claims they’re just a few votes shy.
The imperial presidency. Trump dramatically pushes the bounds of executive power daily, using his overwhelming control over Republicans to extend the reach of the presidency. In recent months, this has run from the Iran war to the Presidential Records Act to “pocket rescissions” to remodeling the White House.
As for the Senate, the fact that Republicans are funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation — prompted by Democrats blocking that funding without reforms — is “just not good” for the future of the appropriations process, Thune said.
But Thune panned Trump’s threats to pull the United States out of NATO, declaring that Senate Republicans would, for the most part, oppose such a move.
Trump FY2027 budget: Congress and the White House are still fighting over FY2026 funding — a massive failure by all involved — although Trump is ready to pivot to FY2027 spending. The White House will introduce its new budget proposal today. This will set up a huge political battle with Democrats over guns vs. butter. Trump will want far higher defense spending even as he pushed cuts to Medicaid and other entitlement programs to pay for the One Big Beautiful Bill. Democrats will fight hard on this.
Trump will call for a $1.5 trillion defense budget next year, with hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon funding set to be jammed through Congress by Republicans on a party-line reconciliation vote, according to Inside Defense. This would be the biggest year-to-year increase in defense spending since World War II.
Presidential budgets are just goals; they’re not binding. Democrats will overwhelmingly reject this proposal, even though many on their side of the aisle want to boost defense spending too.
House Republicans are planning on moving quickly on marking up FY2027 spending bills, although there’s no spending deal with Democrats or the Senate. Yet the only funding bill that must pass this year is a CR from the end of the fiscal year — Sept. 30 — to some point beyond Election Day.
