Republicans in the Senate are going far out of their way to say “no” to Trump without saying no. This Rube Goldberg scheme is pretty convoluted even by Senate standards:
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.
Thune has said multiple times that the filibuster is good for Republicans, and he doesn’t want to repeal it. He also doesn’t want to go against the parliamentarian’s rulings, because he knows there’s a decent chance Republicans might be in the minority next session, or sometime after that.
Basically, Thune is teeing up Senate Republicans for maximal obstruction if a Democrat is elected President in 2028, or if Democrats get the Senate in 2026. His expectation is that, as long as he doesn’t shit all over the Senate rules, Democrats will return the favor.
His expectation is probably correct. There’s enough Senate brain in the Democratic caucus to think that the rules and traditions of the Senate are more important than reversing the horrors of the Trump administration. Thune, like his predecessor Mitch McConnell, knows how to keep the Democrats in line, and he’s going to do it. Plus, Fetterman is going to help him out.
The Senate is the biggest block to the change that Democrats need to make to survive as a party. Because of the compromise struck by the founders, rural states are over-represented. We’d be fools not to get rid of the filibuster, because a 60-40 Senate is a huge stretch in our current political climate.
