Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to end the 51-day Department of Homeland Security shutdown hinges on Republicans’ ability to unite around a party-line reconciliation bill.
This is going to be very tricky. Not impossible. But tricky.
Top Republicans are envisioning multiple reconciliation bills with a spate of priorities stuffed into each.
Reconciliation 2.0. The Senate GOP leadership’s plan is to keep the initial package as narrow as possible, limiting it to only multi-year funding for ICE and CBP. President Donald Trump said he wants this on his desk by June 1.
The idea is for the Senate to move first on a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions and then bring that blueprint to the floor by the end of April.
The Senate will need to instruct the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to spend money as part of the package because of the panel’s jurisdiction over the immigration agencies. The panel’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), created problems for Senate GOP leaders during last year’s reconciliation effort — and he could again. But the Senate Republican leadership can essentially go around Paul if necessary.
The biggest problems are coming from the House, where Johnson is dealing with furious rank-and-file members and a razor-thin margin.
A lot of House Republicans don’t want to approve any part of the Senate-passed DHS funding deal until they see what the Senate does on reconciliation. House conservatives are railing against the idea of separating ICE and CBP from the rest of DHS funding — the necessary first step of the process.
The reconciliation plan hinges on avoiding pay-fors. The GOP leadership will make the case that there’s no need to offset the ICE and CBP money because it’s intended as typical appropriations. That’s a plausible argument, and it could work.
But any demands for offsets or the addition of other priorities could blow up the whole effort by making it politically toxic for GOP moderates. If there’s too much pressure to expand the bill, it could just get too big for Republicans to quickly agree on anything.
Also worth noting: The anti-abortion movement is very focused on the expiration of the ban on Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. That expires July 4.
Even if GOP leaders can keep the second reconciliation bill limited, Republican moderates could wind up unhappy. Some centrists support limited ICE reforms in line with options the White House offered. That’s harder to do in reconciliation, and there’s little appetite among Republicans to include those policies now, Thune said.
Reconciliation 3.0. Johnson is already pointing to reconciliation 3.0 as the place where House Republicans will achieve other priorities. The Budget Committees are at work on a third bill that would target fraud, address priorities from the SAVE America Act and fund the war in Iran.
But conservatives will demand all their priorities be included in Reconciliation 2.0 since it’s abundantly clear 3.0 is far from a sure thing. House and Senate GOP leaders will have limited time to resolve any and all of these disputes.
