Senate Republicans passed their reconciliation bill early Friday morning funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol until the end of fiscal year 2029.
The, 52-47, largely party line final vote followed an all day vote-a-rama that stretched into the early hours of Friday. In the end, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Republican to break with her caucus and vote against the bill. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who is currently running to become the next governor of Colorado, did not vote as he was back in his state to participate in a gubernatorial debate.
Throughout the roughly 18-hour-long vote-a-rama, senators from both sides of the aisle proposed many amendments focused on various priorities. Among them were efforts to rein in President Donald Trump’s so-called “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund, to insert language blocking the construction of Trump’s ballroom, to target acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and even a Republican attempt to include part of the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression initiative, in the reconciliation bill. All of those proposed amendments failed.
The bill is now headed to the House. House GOP leadership initially indicated they would take up the bill on Friday as soon as Senate passed it. But on Thursday, as the Senate vote-a-rama continued, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House GOP leadership cancelled votes and made the decision to send the House home early. The House is expected to take up the reconciliation package next week.
Here are three takeaways from the marathon:
The Trump slush fund lives on
Trump and the Justice Department’s overtly corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” caused weeks of chaos on Capitol Hill, slowing down Republicans from moving forward with their own party-line reconciliation bill and passing their own priorities.
But in the end, all that chaos — including Republican senators feigning that they had finally put their feet down and were standing up to Trump — ended up being all for show. The reconciliation bill Senate Republicans passed does not include any guardrails stopping Trump and the DOJ from creating their slush fund, which could use taxpayer money to pay Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies.
Senate Republicans are instead largely choosing to take acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s word that the slush fund is dead, even after Trump said he loved the idea of a $1.8 billion fund to pay his allies who claim they have been politically persecuted.
During the vote-a-rama, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addressed just that, accusing the Senate GOP of “taking the great values of America on our 250th year and flushing them down the toilet because you’re afraid of Donald Trump.”
“Are Republicans really going to take Todd Blanche, a known liar, at his word?” he asked on the Senate floor.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was working overtime all through the day to convince Republicans that may still be wavering that there was no “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
“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 said, per Punchbowl.
Cover for vulnerable Republicans in reelection fights
Several attempts throughout the day to rein in or make changes to the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” failed. But it did provide an opportunity for some vulnerable Republicans, who are facing tough reelection campaigns, to get some cover for themselves.
The first attempt was an amendment from Schumer to send the reconciliation bill back to committee and add a provision to the text barring Trump’s slush fund. That was effectively an attempt from the Democrats to kill the bill by starting the process all over again.
The vote on that amendment was open for hours as Senate Republicans huddled with their own members who wanted some kind of language in the bill to shut down the fund.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was the first Republican to vote in favor of the amendment.
Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Jon Husted (R-OH) did not cast their vote for hours. After almost three hours and a lot of convincing from GOP leadership, Cassidy voted “no” on the amendment. That set the amendment up to fail, giving Sullivan and Husted the cover to support the amendment knowing that Republicans defeated it.
Next, Cassidy and his team reportedly spent hours trying to craft an amendment on the slush fund that would be allowed on a 50-vote threshold.
Those efforts largely came up short and in the end Cassidy, alongside Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), offered an amendment — which failed to clear the 60-vote hurdle — that would have redirected the money in the fund to law enforcement officers injured during the Jan. 6 attack.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) also offered an amendment of his own, proposing to redirect the fund towards fraud enforcement within the DOJ. That received bipartisan opposition as many Democrats were not happy with the language of the amendment.
A ‘very bad precedent’
Big picture, experts told TPM, using the party-line reconciliation process and undercutting the annual appropriations process to fund these controversial agencies sets “a very bad precedent.”
It’s another example of congressional Republicans weakening their own power of the purse. It also threatens future appropriations negotiations and undermines congressional oversight.
It “sets a precedent where, in the future, if there are sticking points that are partisan, what might happen is that they agree on all the bipartisan stuff and then let the partisan piece go to a follow-on reconciliation bill,” Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told TPM Thursday.
The reconciliation bill does not include the report, the directions and the guidance that an appropriations bill would typically include. That means it gives the administration and the agencies receiving the money much more flexibility to use the money however they may want.
“It’s almost like a blank check for those agencies, because there’s no guidance,” William Hoagland, senior vice president for the Bipartisan Policy Center, told TPM.
And some appropriators are feeling uneasy about those same concerns.
Murkowski, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the only Republican to vote against the reconciliation bill, previously raised concerns about it circumventing the appropriations process.
“I believe very strongly that we needed to fund ICE and CBP, but to completely bypass regular order and the appropriations process by funding for three and a half years, to me … it takes it out of the process that we have always looked to for funding our agencies,” Murkowski said, according to NBC News.
She had also expressed similar concerns in the earlier stages of the reconciliation process.
“I absolutely support funding for those who provide security for our nation, but Congress cannot abdicate its core oversight and appropriations responsibilities in the process,” Murkowski said in an April statement, following the passage of the budget resolution.
“Nobody wants to go down that slippery slope,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), another member of the Senate Appropriations committee, told TPM on Tuesday when asked about the three-year funding. “If we want to save the appropriations process, we can’t use this as a back door.”
There’s really only one takeaway: the Senate MAGA party caucus are all in on the violent lawless ICE paramilitary thugs being lavishly funded to harass both citizens and immigrants and try to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections AND Dear Leader™️ can steal as much as he wants.