By hour 13 of Thursday’s Senate “vote-a-rama,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was growing visibly frustrated.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) had spent the day consulting with the parliamentarian on a way, any way, to block an anti-weaponization fund the Justice Department had announced weeks earlier, and he was busy shuttling to and from the Senate floor to inquire about new versions of legislative text.
The matter was moot to Thune. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared the fund dead two days earlier in congressional testimony, helping calm a bipartisan uproar over its expected payouts to Jan. 6 defendants.
But Cassidy, politically liberated after his primary loss in Louisiana, would not let the issue drop, and he wanted that promise written into legislation funding deportation operations at the Department of Homeland Security.
“This would have been done several hours ago if we weren’t having to deal with some of the issues around the fund, which doesn’t exist, which is the point we’re making,” Thune told the Washington Examiner shortly before midnight.
“He’s redrafted it many, many times in the last 13 hours,” Thune said, “so we’re trying to push to get him to do something with it, and soon.”
The Senate eventually passed that immigration enforcement bill. Cassidy was unable to find a solution that would allow his provision to be adopted by a simple majority vote, and he admitted defeat in the early hours of Friday morning.
But the entire episode was emblematic of a larger problem for Thune. President Donald Trump had created the headache out of thin air, brokering the “anti-weaponization” fund — the product of a legal settlement — just as the legislation was ready to be put on the floor. And he made matters worse by alienating Cassidy, who had spent the last year and a half largely aligned with Trump’s agenda.
That is, until the president ran a primary challenge against Cassidy and ousted him from his seat last month.
‘Mixed signals’
Thune has become accustomed to the whiplash as a feature, not a bug, of the second Trump presidency. He’s navigated controversial Cabinet nominees, a dispute over the SAVE America Act, and the constant churn of a Trump-driven news cycle.
But the road to passing the immigration bill was particularly rocky, and the anti-weaponization fund wasn’t the only speed bump. There was the security funding the White House wanted for Trump’s East Wing ballroom. The money was excluded from the final bill, but not without days of hand-wringing from vulnerable Republicans who feared being linked to what Democrats called an expensive vanity project.
There was even discussion with the White House about adding money for Trump’s triumphal arch, according to a source familiar with the matter, although it was not contemplated seriously enough for Republicans to draft legislative text. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Each development presented a dilemma Thune had to untangle in private or during last-minute haggling on the Senate floor. The last time Republicans pushed a partisan bill through reconciliation, it became a behemoth that almost didn’t pass the Senate. This time, Thune wanted to keep it “skinny,” or “anorexically skinny” as he’d say for emphasis.
For the anti-weaponization fund, it took a Tuesday phone call with Blanche to find a path forward. Thune expressed the trouble it was causing for members of his conference, and when Blanche informed him that he’d address the fund in congressional testimony later that day, Thune said a definitive statement would go a long way in getting the immigration bill through the Senate, according to a source familiar with the call.
On the Senate floor, Thune spent hours huddling with vulnerable incumbents who still had to navigate amendment votes on the fund, and it took some legislative gymnastics Thursday to allow Republicans to vote against it without actually jeopardizing the bill.
Through it all, Thune was dealing with mixed signals from the president, who undermined Blanche Wednesday by musing that he wasn’t sure the fund was dead and that he viewed it as a “beautiful thing.”
“There certainly have been mixed signals on some of these issues with the acting attorney general,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who repeatedly voted to kill the anti-weaponization fund during the vote-a-rama. “The White House’s position has been rather confusing.”
A monthslong saga
The outcome Thune achieved on Friday morning, after an 18-hour vote-a-rama, was hardly Plan A for Republicans. The Senate was on the verge of passing funding for all of DHS back in January, before the fatal shooting of two protesters in Minneapolis blew up negotiations and ignited a monthslong shutdown at the agency.
Democrats, up until that point, were going to fund immigration enforcement and settle for modest reforms, including money for body cameras, after a protester was killed by a DHS agent.
After the second, Democrats walked away from the deal and began weeks of fruitless negotiations for more significant guardrails on officer conduct. The White House offered a list of concessions, but not the more ambitious ones Democrats sought, and Republicans found themselves back at square one.
By April, Thune managed to bring the White House around to a two-step plan that sidestepped the Democrats. Republicans could fund everything except Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the two departments at the center of the Minneapolis shootings, through the regular appropriations process.
The deportation operations would then be funded through reconciliation, a filibuster-skirting budget process, with just Republican votes and would last three years — effectively taking the problem off the table for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s curveballs
That plan is about to come to fruition. The House will take up the Senate bill funding ICE next week, and Trump already signed into law legislation reopening the rest of DHS.
But the entire ordeal has strained Thune’s relationship with the president and has fueled a sense among Senate Republicans that Trump is making life harder than it needs to be, both legislatively and on the campaign trail.
Trump initially opposed the go-it-alone plan to fund ICE. The president also threw a curveball in March when he demanded that Democrats accept the SAVE America Act, his signature election bill, for Republicans to support any deal on DHS.
Outside of reconciliation, Trump has created trouble for Republicans with his unexpected announcements. Senators brokered a bipartisan deal to extend the federal government’s spy powers, but that agreement now hangs in the balance after Trump appointed a loyalist with no national security experience as his acting director of national intelligence.
On Friday, Thune delicately blamed “timing issues” for the setbacks.
‘It’s always difficult’
To Trump’s defenders, the drama of this week was nothing unusual. Vote-a-ramas routinely stretch late into the night, and though Democrats latched on to the anti-weaponization fund, they’ve made affordability and other political flashpoints the centerpiece of their messaging on other occasions.
“It’s always difficult,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. There’s always some hiccup, there’s always some roadblocks.”
Still, the fight over reconciliation demonstrated the growing gulf between Senate Republicans and the White House. They were already livid with Trump for ousting Cassidy and helping to defeat a second incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), in May.
By the time the Justice Department scrapped the anti-weaponization fund, the damage had already been done, and Thune was left with the job of keeping Republicans aligned with the White House while still letting them register their disapproval.
SENATE REPUBLICANS PUMP THE BRAKES ON TODD BLANCHE AG NOMINATION
One of the middle grounds, an amendment authored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), blocked the anti-weaponization fund and redirected the money to assist the DOJ’s fraud task force, an effort that Democrats opposed.
A dozen Republicans voted for that amendment, but it failed without Democratic support. Republicans also broke with Trump on several Democrat-led amendments, but none of them passed.