Emine Yücel has a report up this morning on a new “deal” being kicked around the Senate that would attempt to fix the airport situation. This proposal would fund most of DHS — including the TSA — without funding ICE enforcement operations.
Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, in a reconciliation bill, which, under Senate rules, can pass with only 51 votes. That means Republicans won’t need Democrats to get it through.
The deal is similar to how one might have predicted this would end for weeks. But it includes one weird, emerging point: Republicans might also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.
The SAVE America Act — a sweeping voter suppression bill — has been a kind of chaos factor for months now, scrambling the Texas Senate primary and, more recently, scuttling the last attempt at a Senate deal to end the partial government shutdown. Trump demanded Republican senators not cut a deal with Democrats and instead sent ICE into airports to back up TSA, his idea of a solution.
Politico reports that, yesterday, Trump agreed to back this new deal to partially end the DHS shutdown, so long as Republicans get aspects of the SAVE Act into a reconciliation package.
But budget reconciliation is only meant to be used for, essentially, budget stuff. A sweeping voter suppression bill is not budget stuff. Not at all. So what is happening here?
Some Senate Republicans have been contending there is a way to get the SAVE Act through with budget reconciliation. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) earlier this month proposed his conference hire “a really smart lawyer” to figure it out. This hypothetical individual could supposedly “help us craft a SAVE Act that can survive a Byrd bath,” the process through which the Senate parliamentarian strips out from a reconciliation bill any measures that don’t qualify for reconciliation.
Republicans could also refuse to abide by the parliamentarian’s rulings. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), during the last reconciliation process, was clear that he did not want to break with precedent and do so.
As one of our go-to budget experts, Bobby Kogan, explained to Emine:
“The meat of the Save Act cannot be done in reconciliation unless you’re willing to break the rules of reconciliation,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.
Kogan explained Republicans could “pay states to voluntarily change their state rules, to do some of the stuff in the Save Act” but they are trying to set “binding national requirements, and that sort of thing is either non budgetary in some cases or merely incidental in other cases” and can’t be addressed in the reconciliation process.
“There’s a deeper political problem,” Kogan added. “If you can finagle some very, very minor stuff, do they get to pretend they have a win? Or does it further enrage the people who know that it’s nowhere close to what they’re actually seeking?”
Passing the SAVE Act would be a disaster for American democracy. But we’re not sure that’s what Senate Republicans are really up to here.
We’ll be watching to see if this is a genuine attempt to pass the SAVE Act, or an effort to kick the can, get Trump off their backs, and disclaim responsibility when they find that — even with some smart lawyers — they can’t get the SAVE Act through using reconciliation after all.
