The border crisis that began almost immediately after the presidency passed from Donald Trump to Joe Biden came to a close within a month of Biden handing the Oval Office back to Trump. As it turns out, the record-setting influx of illegal immigrants and fentanyl flooding the border every month didn’t require a new set of laws. It just required a new president, who, as it turns out, is the same as the old one who secured the border in the first place.
Thanks to his revived diplomatic deals — that is, Remain in Mexico and the Safe Third Country deals with our Northern Triangle neighbors — and enforcing the law as written in the form of a 627% increase in ICE arrests, illegal border crossings in February fell to fewer than 9,000, just 3% of the Biden monthly peak of more than 301,000 crossings. While Trump can and should surely codify some of these border security provisions so a future president can’t use executive fiat to unbuild the wall, the border crisis, as far as an immediate priority goes, is already over thanks to the unilateral action of one Donald Trump.
So why is the Senate stalling and pretending it needs to pass a border security bill before it passes “one big, beautiful bill” to make Trump’s economic legacy the permanent law of the land?
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has managed the impossible in wrangling his four-vote Republican majority into passing the boondoggle budget framework for what will become “one big, beautiful bill,” which we will affectionately call OBBB from here on out. OBBB is expected to codify some new campaign promises, such as lower corporate taxes for domestic manufacturers and limiting taxes on overtime pay. Its cornerstone is the permanent extension of the provisions of Trump’s landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are due to expire in the midterm election year of 2026. Some new border security spending, as well as energy and permitting reform, is expected to be included in some capacity, but those handfuls of billions of dollars are mere pennies next to the $2.2 trillion of extending the TCJA.
For some reason, despite the president’s express insistence that the Senate take up OBBB, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) hasn’t even proposed a budget to reconcile with what the House finished back in February, let alone a concept of an actual bill itself. While Thune is instead prioritizing a stand-alone border bill before considering OBBB, the rest of his caucus is teasing a novel way to avoid having to pay for extending the TCJA — just pretend the cost is zero!
This bout of mathematical trickery likely won’t pass the smell test by the Senate parliamentarian, the referee who decides whether Congress can sneak through a spending bill with a simple majority, and if the Senate refuses to make the spending cuts that House Republicans have already embraced, it means that any bill will require Democratic buy-in in the upper chamber.
In other words, it would be dead on arrival in the House.
Delaying OBBB as the clock ticks closer to 2026 is bad enough because Democrats gain leverage the closer Republicans get to the TCJA’s expiration. When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, absent a TCJA extension, nearly two-thirds of people will see a hike, with the average taxpayer receiving a 22% increase. The 9 in 10 people who have benefited from the guaranteed standard deduction will see that deduction slashed in half, and not only will the failure of OBBB mean that the Trump administration failed to fulfill a campaign promise of an expanded child tax credit, the CTC would actually be halved if the TCJA expires.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO), the architect of the OBBB machinations, understands that his Senate counterparts are trying to kick the can down the road because a border bill is a much easier political lift, namely because it would allow senators to take credit for Trump singlehandedly ending a crisis that dominated voter concerns, and that they’re engaging in a fairy-tale fallacy of accounting and mathematics for whenever they actually do encounter how to pay for OBBB because that’s easier than having to pay for spending.
DOGE NEEDS A SCALPEL, NOT AN AX
“If you can eat dessert first, you’re not going to eat the broccoli later,” Smith said last week about the need to keep everything from tax cuts to border security in OBBB. “And so some of my members of this conference, if you just give them border and energy first, they’re not gonna eat the broccoli.”
If voters delivered Trump a second term for any one reason, it was to bring real disposable income back up after Bidenomics let inflation erode the prosperity of both the working and middle classes. The most important part of that mandate is, first, to do no harm, and that means avoiding an automatic tax hike on the majority of taxpayers. The Senate can have its border dessert if it really wants to pretend it helped solve the migrant crisis, but the House is correct to demand Republicans include some budgetary broccoli. A failure to prioritize the TCJA’s extension and OBBB is not just a failure to fulfill Trump’s agenda but, more crucially, a failure to deliver the key reason voters entrusted Republicans with power in the first place.