Senate GOP leaders’ sales pitch to the rank-and-file on their plan to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown begins today.
Most critically, the Republican leadership has to get GOP senators on board with a “very, very skinny” reconciliation bill, according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The quickest way to ensure failure is if the bill balloons into a GOP wish list.
“If [Thune] starts making deals with other senators to get their stuff in there, you’re talking to another senator that’s going to want his stuff in there,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters, adding he’d want to see elements of the SAVE America Act included.
That’s precisely the kind of spiral that Republican leaders are worried about.
“To execute on it and do it with any kind of speed, you’ve got to keep it really tight,” Thune said Monday night.
The framework. The Senate GOP leadership’s plan is to pass a reconciliation bill with three years of ICE and CBP funding — and absolutely nothing else. They’ve got President Donald Trump’s blessing. The new spending wouldn’t be offset, and the rest of the DHS budget would come in a bipartisan bill that the House is still sitting on.
The pitch to fiscal hawks will be that the package contains funding that’s normally part of the annual appropriations process, which isn’t paid for. That’s convincing for some of those Republicans, though others are skeptical.
“I can understand the argument but I think we ought to pay for everything,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said. “We’re running $2 trillion deficits.”
Thune pushed back by saying that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another deficit hawk and close Scott ally, is on board with the zero-offset plan.
Top Senate Republicans are particularly concerned about making sure the Senate Finance Committee isn’t involved in the reconciliation bill because it would open the vote-a-rama to politically sensitive issues like health care.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said the Senate’s DHS funding efforts before recess dragged past 2 a.m. because Republicans needed Customs funding to be in the bipartisan package. If that were left to reconciliation, the Finance panel would have to be involved.
The sprint. Top Senate Republicans are already preparing to move quickly on reconciliation and get a budget resolution to the floor as soon as next week.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters he doesn’t know yet whether he’ll hold a markup of the budget resolution that kicks off the process. The House Budget Committee could also skip that step, proceeding to the Rules Committee and then the floor.
Speed is essential as Senate Republicans try to convince their House counterparts to finally pass the bipartisan Senate-approved funding bill for the rest of DHS. Thune will have his weekly meeting today with Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s facing all sorts of objections from his members.
