Senate Republicans left Washington on Thursday without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, after a tense closed-door meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche failed to ease GOP anger over the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund the Justice Department unveiled Monday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Blanche "had an appreciation for the depth of feeling" in the room, then pushed the vote to the week of June 1, blowing past President Trump's self-imposed deadline.
The delay is the most concrete break between Senate Republicans and the White House of Trump's second term, and it scrambles the administration's plan to finance its deportation campaign through the end of his presidency without Democratic votes. It also follows a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday by two Capitol Police officers seeking to block the fund, which some pardoned Jan. 6 defendants have said they may apply to.
The meeting
Blanche was dispatched to the Hill on Thursday morning to defuse the revolt and, according to senators and aides in the room, did not. "You could call it a curveball right at the end, and nobody could hit it," Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville told reporters afterward. A senior Republican aide told CBS News the ICE and Border Patrol bill "would have been passed, if not for the actions of the administration" and that Blanche "didn't fix" the problem his department had created.
Blanche told senators no money from the reconciliation bill would flow to the fund and that people who assaulted law enforcement would not be eligible, Tuberville and Maine Sen. Susan Collins said afterward. Collins said she still wants the assurance in writing. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who lost his own primary last weekend after Trump endorsed his opponent, was unmoved. "The kind of gut reaction is that's not right, and if it's not right, we shouldn't be doing it," Cassidy told reporters.
McConnell's rebuke
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who skipped the meeting to chair a hearing, issued the day's sharpest line. "The nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?" McConnell said in a statement, calling the settlement "utterly stupid, morally wrong". North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who is not seeking re-election, told Spectrum News the fund was stupid on stilts, Al Jazeera reported. Nebraska Sen. Don Bacon told the same outlet Trump's underlying suit against the IRS smelled because the president is both plaintiff and boss of the defendants.
The Cornyn factor
Frustration was deepened by Trump's Tuesday endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn in next week's Texas Republican primary runoff, a move senators view as imperiling a seat they consider winnable in November. Thune linked the two fights without naming Cornyn. "I think it's hard to divorce anything that happens here from what's happening in the political atmosphere around us," he said, adding that the White House should have consulted Congress before announcing the settlement, which made "everything way harder than it should be".
What Trump said
Trump on Wednesday demanded Republicans fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who ruled Saturday that $1 billion in Secret Service money tied to his planned East Wing ballroom did not qualify for the reconciliation bill, and renewed his call to end the filibuster. Asked Thursday whether he was losing control of the Senate, Trump said, "I really don't know. I can tell you — I only do what's right". He also told reporters, "I don't need money for the ballroom", which he had originally said would be paid for with private funds.
The administration insists the two fights are unrelated. A Justice Department spokesperson said Blanche "made clear that the Anti-Weaponization Fund announced Monday has nothing to do with reconciliation, indeed not a single dime from the money the President is seeking in reconciliation would go toward anything having to do with the Fund". The argument did not carry the room; Democrats had lined up reconciliation amendments to block the fund or bar payouts to Jan. 6 defendants, and Republicans concluded the votes would split their conference.
The Senate returns June 1. The Texas primary runoff is Tuesday.