Republicans flee DC after flap on 'weaponization fund,' ballroom spending
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans abandoned plans to vote on funding for immigration enforcement on Thursday in a revolt against one of President Donald Trump’s priorities: a $1.8 billion fund for victims of government “weaponization,” including those convicted of violent crimes during the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
The Senate walked away from a $72 billion bill funding Trump’s massive migrant deportation led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, delaying the vote at least until June, when lawmakers return from a one-week Memorial Day holiday recess.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune had sought to focus the legislation narrowly to secure the money intended to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s presidency.
But the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and another $1 billion for building a White House ballroom were added at Trump’s behest, and became sticking points.
“It was something that was supposed to be very narrow, targeted, focused, clean, straightforward, and it got a little bit more complicated this week,” Thune said, expressing his frustration. “It makes everything way harder than it should be.”
The partisan ICE funding bill became embroiled in party politics after a Trump-backed challenger unseated two-term Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and the president endorsed a primary challenger over veteran Republican Senator John Cornyn in Texas.
Presidents usually back their party’s incumbents. Republicans said Trump’s opposition to Cassidy and Cornyn added to the mood of acrimony surrounding the debate.
“He’s lost some support in the Senate,” said Nebraska Republican Representative Don Bacon, who predicted that Senate Republicans would have to impose curbs on Trump’s fund, which the Justice Department announced as part of a court settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service.
“He’s the plaintiff and the boss of the defendants. So just on the surface, it smells,” he said.
Acting AG summoned to Capitol Hill
Against that backdrop, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche was summoned to Capitol Hill to face questions from angry senators when he made his case for the $1.8 billion fund designed to compensate Trump allies and others who the administration says were victims of government “weaponization.”
Blanche has also denied that Trump set up the settlement fund.
During Blanche’s meeting, several senators insisted that the money not be used to compensate people convicted of assaulting law enforcement during the Capitol riot, a person briefed on the meeting said.
Trump had already pardoned many of those convicted for crimes they committed during that deadly assault.
“I think there are people who are concerned about public relations,” Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, told reporters about the meeting.
Emotions were so raw that a planned White House meeting including Trump, Senate Republicans and House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson was canceled, according to a separate source familiar with the arrangement.
A White House official said the administration appreciated the day’s conversation and feedback. “We look forward to additional conversations as needed.”
Bipartisan resistance to ballroom funding
The resistance against Trump became evident late on Wednesday when Senate Republicans said “no” to $1 billion in new security funding for the 90,000-square-foot (8,360-square-meter) ballroom Trump wants to build on the site of the White House East Wing, which he had razed last October.
For months, Trump has said no taxpayer dollars would be needed for the project. Nonetheless, a $1 billion tab to be picked up by taxpayers was presented to senators as an add-on to a $72 billion bill for Trump’s migrant deportation program.
Bacon said the White House had failed to communicate that most of the $1 billion ballroom money would fund needed security upgrades across the White House complex. “The ballroom was rolled out so badly that I’m not sure it can be recovered in the near term,” he said.
Democrats hammered away about a “glitzy,” “gauzy” “vanity project,” a preview of their midterm election pitch addressing voters’ worries about the high prices of food, housing, healthcare and particularly gasoline, which skyrocketed after the February 28 U.S. attack on Iran.
Thune, who started the week with a tense phone call with the president over his endorsement against Cornyn, told reporters after Thursday’s meeting that his party “will pick up where we left off” after the holiday recess.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection, did not hold back in criticizing Trump.
“I think it’s stupid on stilts,” Tillis said of the “anti-weaponization” fund in an interview with Spectrum News. “The American people are going to reject this out of hand.”
Other congressional news
▪ A once-bipartisan effort broke down Thursday as the House rejected a bill to pave the way for the construction of a Smithsonian museum honoring women.
Previously championed by both sides of the aisle, the legislation saw last-minute changes at a House Administration Committee markup in March that led Democrats to withdraw their backing. The new version would prohibit exhibits from including transgender women or girls, as well as give the final say on location to Trump.
“A museum about women, fought for and supported by women, should not be controlled by one man,” leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus said in a statement earlier this week.
The bill would allow the museum to be built within the reserve of the National Mall, an area where construction is tightly controlled. Although the bill names the South Monument site across from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, it would also give the president the ability to “designate an alternative site” at his discretion. Democrats have decried the changes as a “poison pill” that derailed years of work.
The floor vote this week was supposed to be a chance for Republicans to position themselves as defenders of women’s rights and to paint their opponents as unsympathetic to the cause.
“They claim, the other side, to be the party of women — yet it is the Republican Party that introduced the 19th Amendment,” said the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., on the floor earlier Thursday, referring to the change last century that allowed American women to vote. “And yes, there’s a Republican president today that has authorized the women’s history museum, and it will be the Republican majority in Congress that gets this done.”
But Republicans couldn’t stay united to pass the bill on their own, with several of their members breaking away to vote with Democrats to defeat the effort. GOP leaders circulated around the chamber, trying to convince the holdouts.
After roughly an hour, leaders gave up and closed the vote at 204-216.
▪ Daylight saving time would stay in effect year-round under a House proposal that advanced on Thursday, reviving an idea that Americans weary of biannual clock switching have long supported but has repeatedly fizzled in Congress.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act, which would likely implement the change as part of a five-year transportation bill.
Supporters of the measure say the time shift causes sleep disturbances, greater workplace injuries and more car crashes. They also believe brighter evenings would spur more economic activity during winter.
The bill still must pass the full House, and then the Senate would consider whether to take up the measure, which faces opposition from Republican Tom Cotton and others.
Cotton has said it would result in absurdly late winter sunrises and force children to go to school in darkness in much of the country. The law would allow states to opt out.
Rep. Vern Buchanan, who has put forward the idea every year since 2018, proposed it again this year. The plan is popular in the lawmaker’s home state of Florida because it would allow more evening hours of play on golf courses and sports fields.
The Senate voted unanimously in March 2022 for the move but the House never voted on the measure.
Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, said permanent daylight saving time is “better for safety and will boost New Jersey’s tourism industry. Let’s stop changing the clocks twice a year.”
Daylight saving time - putting the clocks forward one hour during the summer half of the year - has been in place in nearly all of the United States since the 1960s.
Year-round daylight saving time was used during World War Two and enacted again in 1974 in a bid to reduce energy use. But it was deeply unpopular and repealed later that year.
▪ The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 54-11 to approve rail safety language that would boost safety procedures for trains carrying hazardous materials and toughen rules on railcar wheel bearings.
The lawmakers voted to attach the provision to a five-year $580 billion highway bill that is being debated. The vote came after the White House urged lawmakers to pass long-stalled rail safety legislation after the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern-operated NSC.N train in Ohio that caught fire and released over a million gallons of hazardous materials and pollutants.
Despite support from Trump and many Democrats, the bill’s fate is in doubt and faces significant opposition from railroads and some Republicans in Congress.
Rep. Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican, said the bill was necessary because the derailment “exposed serious weaknesses in the freight rail industry safety practices, particularly when it comes to transporting hazardous materials.”
Rep. Sam Graves, the Republican chair of the committee, said the bill would add billions over 10 years to the cost of shipping by rail. “It’s going to ripple across the entire supply chain,” Graves said.
The 2023 derailment was triggered by a catastrophic mechanical failure of an overheated railcar wheel bearing. Norfolk Southern in 2024 agreed to a Justice Department settlement worth $310 million, including agreeing to install additional devices to detect overheated wheel bearings early enough to prevent derailments.
The legislation would require enhanced safety procedures for trains carrying hazardous materials, as well as require wayside defect detectors, a minimum of two-person crews and increased fines for wrongdoing.
The Association of American Railroads, which represents major rail companies, said after the vote, the bill includes “extraneous mandates under the veil of safety that will only increase costs throughout the freight network and broader supply chain with no proven safety benefit.”
▪ A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a group of current and former congressional lawmakers is not barred from recovering damages in a case over whether members of Congress are owed back pay for years of suppressed cost-of-living increases.
The lawmakers’ legal team has argued that Congress and the president have violated the 27th Amendment with laws that repeatedly blocked the annual cost-of-living adjustments to lawmaker salaries set out in a 1989 law. Members of Congress last received a pay adjustment in 2009, when their salary was increased 2.8% to $174,000.
The 27th Amendment states that no law “varying” lawmaker compensation “shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”
Besides ruling that the lawmakers are not prevented from recovering damages, Judge Eric G. Bruggink of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims found that the 27th Amendment applies to laws that decrease congressional compensation and that laws blocking cost-of-living adjustments are statutes “varying” lawmaker compensation under the amendment.
“Laws varying congressional compensation are ineffective to the extent they seek to effectuate a change in congressional compensation before an election intervenes,” Bruggink wrote in the opinion.
The U.S. government had argued the challenged statutes did not “vary” congressional pay and, as such, did not implicate the 27th Amendment.
Still, there are other questions that need to be answered in the case, Bruggink wrote in the opinion, including “when an election ‘intervenes’ for purposes of the Amendment.”
The lawsuit is being pursued by Reps. Rick Crawford, R-Ark.; James E. Clyburn, D-S.C.; and Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., along with former Reps. Rodney L. Davis, R-Ill., and Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo.
The opinion marks a rare ruling on the parameters of the 27th Amendment. At oral arguments earlier this year, the judge made an apparent nod to the weighty constitutional issues at play and said the issue is likely to end up at a higher court.
CQ-Roll Call and Reuters contributed to this report.
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