Republicans’ ICE and CBP Bill Release Kicks Off Complex Sprint

Republicans will come back from recess next week with just a handful of legislative days to surmount multiple procedural hurdles to fund immigration and border enforcement by President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline.

A handful of key committees and both chambers of Congress will have to vote to complete the budget reconciliation process. That allows Republicans to circumvent Senate filibuster rules and pass legislation released Monday night that would spend $72 billion on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and other agencies.

Both chambers are scheduled to be out the week of May 25 because of Memorial Day. That creates a natural pressure point to quickly get Republicans in the narrowly-controlled legislature in line behind the complicated gambit to address the lapse in annual funding brought on by a partisan stalemate.

Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is expected to bring the overall package to a floor vote the week of May 18, according to Republican aides familiar with the planning. But several committees must complete their individual work before that can happen.

“It’s always nice to have a recess to be the backstop because it helps members to focus,” said Jonathan Burks, executive vice president for economic and health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former top Republican congressional aide. “The dynamic is often, if you have time, ‘why should I negotiate now when I might be able to get a better deal two days from now?’”

Democrats have refused to give money to immigration enforcement agencies absent significant changes to how they operate, prompting Republicans to adopt a budget resolution last week allowing them to implement those funding streams without the minority’s votes.

BGOV Analysis: Draft Immigration-Border Reconciliation Bill

Senate Panels to Vote

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will meet in the coming days to vote its share of the bill out of committee.

The Senate Judiciary Committee isn’t expected to hold a formal markup of its portion of the bill but has protectively scheduled one in case the homeland panel doesn’t advance their portion.

The Budget Committee, chaired by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), would likely need to meet as well to staple the two parts of the reconciliation bills together before they can be considered on the floor. A spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment on Graham’s plans.

Read More: BGOV OnPoint: Next GOP Reconciliation Package Unveiled

Democrats’ best chance of derailing the process of any reconciliation bill would come in meetings with the Senate’s parliamentarian, where they could convince her the language in the bill violates a rule of the expedited procedure barring non-budgetary items.

Those meetings are known as “Byrd baths” for the namesake of the rules underpinning those deliberations, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

Democrats will review Republicans’ bill “line by line” to “vigorously challenge any provision that violates the Byrd Rule,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement late Monday.

But Merkley has previously tempered expectations if Republicans keep the bill narrow. The language resembles provisions that already passed procedural muster in last year’s tax-and-spending law that also funded ICE and Border Patrol, allowing Republicans to lean on recent precedent.

“If they simply stick to the amount of money, then there’s virtually nothing to Byrd bath,” Merkley told Bloomberg Government before the bills were released. “This is a very different reconciliation from the previous one.”

Senators should expect another long night when Thune puts the package on the floor. Democrats will be able to force hours of debate and then an unlimited number of amendment votes in a so-called vote-a-rama before final passage. They plan to once again prioritize amendments with Democratic proposals to address voters’ concerns about the cost of living.

“If Republicans think they are finished taking these difficult votes, they got another thing coming,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week. “Democrats will make sure Republicans face more votes on affordability when reconciliation comes back up in a few weeks because it’s so important to the American people.”

House Stares Down Recess

A Senate-passed bill could face complications in the House, where Republicans have a restive conference eager to add additional priorities to any fiscal packages before the end of midterm elections defending their narrow majority.

Republicans could see similar wrangling over this bill as they did on the budget resolution. Members leveraged that must-pass vehicle to press for their unrelated priorities last month, delaying both the Rules Committee’s preparations over the course of three days and the resolution’s ultimate adoption vote that lasted more than five hours.

The House Rules Committee would once again likely play a key role in approving the Senate’s bill before it can advance to the House floor to allow Republicans to send it to Trump’s desk with a simple majority. Democrats are expected to balk at giving that legislation the two-thirds majority support necessary to suspend the rules and quickly pass it.

Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), a former House member, gave a Capitol tour last week that went past Johnson’s office while the speaker was negotiating with budget holdouts and half-joked that the measure was supposed to be the easy part of the two-step reconciliation process.

“It’s not that hard,” he said.