By MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A standoff between the White House and the Senate remains unresolved after Republican senators defiantly left town 10 days ago without passing legislation to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies.
Senate Republicans who are returning to Washington on Monday say they won’t have the votes to pass the Homeland Security spending bill until the White House works with them to place parameters on a new $1.776 billion settlement fund designed to compensate Trump’s allies. Trump and the White House have yet to say publicly whether they will do so, even after a judge temporarily halted any payouts.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated Monday he was hopeful the White House would move to drop the fund.
“I do think the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves,” Thune told reporters.
Thune, of South Dakota, previously said that the settlement money — some of which could potentially go to Trump supporters who beat police and attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — was complicating the GOP’s agenda. It “just makes everything way harder than it should be,” he said.
The impasse over the “anti-weaponization” fund could be an inflection point as Republicans try to keep their majority in this year’s elections and advance their agenda. Trump’s campaign year push to defeat GOP lawmakers who he sees as disloyal, including some of Thune’s most reliable Republican votes in the narrow 53-47 Senate, has only added to the tension.
Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas both lost reelection bids in May after Trump endorsed their primary opponents, and it’s unclear how supportive they’ll be of the president’s agenda going forward. And a growing number of GOP senators have become frustrated with the president as he ignores what they see as their political needs.
“I think it’s hard to divorce anything that happens here from what’s happening in the political atmosphere around us,” Thune said.
Democrats have said they plan to offer several amendments to the immigration bill to scale back or eliminate the settlement. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said in a letter to colleagues Monday morning that Democrats will launch “a coordinated effort to kill the slush fund before one cent goes out the door.”
“No matter what Republicans do, we will force them to vote on it,” he wrote.
As anger among Senate Republicans swelled, Trump made clear that he wasn’t highly concerned.
“I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump said last week in a discussion about the Iran war.
Senate Republicans draw lines on settlement fund
At a closed-door meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche before they left town, Republican senators gave an ultimatum of sorts — put some limits on the settlement or we will do it for you.
GOP senators had been discussing several ways that they could curb the fund, including limiting who can receive payouts, changing the makeup of the commission in charge of settlement decisions, adding some sort of judicial review for applicants or scrapping the fund altogether. Republicans have discussed adding parameters on the settlement to the unrelated immigration enforcement measure but would prefer that the White House make changes on its own.
There were few signs of progress over the Memorial Day recess.
Sen. Todd Young of Indiana told The Associated Press last week that he hadn’t seen any indications “that would suggest they sent us a plan that our leadership thought was acceptable.”
“It’s in their court,” Young said of the White House.
Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said on Fox New Channel’s “Fox News Sunday” that discussions are underway “to get to something that’s going to work.”
“I think there were just more details and more questions last week that needed to be resolved,” Hagerty said, adding that “I’m looking forward to seeing the details this coming week.”
Acting attorney general spars with the Senate
Blanche told the AP in an interview Thursday that “a lot of the questions will be answered in the short term.” But he would not elaborate, saying that “talking in hypotheticals is something that I don’t think is fair to the process.”
Blanche’s meeting with senators before they left town was “angry,” according to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who described it on his podcast. Cruz said that of around 45 Senate Republicans who attended, “at least half of them were blasting the attorney general.”
The Senate had planned to stay in session late that night to vote on the immigration spending bill, but leaders canceled votes and sent everyone home. Cruz said Republican senators were “yelling” and told Blanche that the fund, which was part of a settlement that resolves Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, “feels like self-dealing” and “feels like Trump cut a deal with himself.”
Cruz, who said he supports the fund, noted that Democrats had said they would offer amendments to kill it. Republicans “would have lost every vote” if they had stayed in session, he said.
He predicted that “we will see the administration announcing at a minimum a modification of this, because if they don’t, they’ve got a full-on revolt in the Senate.”
Jan. 6 defendants could get settlements
Cruz said that there were a lot of questions from senators about the Jan. 6 defendants and that Blanche reassured them that no one who committed an act of violence or assaulted law enforcement would get a payout. But Blanche has repeatedly declined to say that publicly, telling the AP that “there is no limit to who can apply.”
Asked about people who were violent on Jan. 6, Blanche suggested that might be too hard to define.
“Who is it? I mean, you tell me, right?” Blanche said. “You have to define something and then stick to it. So that’s something I’ve been hesitant to try to do because it’s very fact intensive.”
Trump has pardoned more than 1,500 defendants who were prosecuted in the 2021 attack, including hundreds who were convicted for violently beating and injuring police.
Unity on immigration enforcement derailed by other issues
The divide over the fund comes after Republicans already abandoned $1 billion in security funding for the White House, including for Trump’s new ballroom, as Democrats and some Republicans questioned using taxpayer money for the massive project at a time of economic hardship. Besides the settlement, Democrats had planned to force Republican senators to vote for or against the ballroom money.
Left in the legislation is funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, which Democrats have blocked for months in protest of the administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
Republicans are using a complicated budget maneuver called reconciliation to fund the agencies through the end of Trump’s term without Democratic support. Still, success requires GOP unity and Trump’s eventual signature.
Democrats say they hope their Republican colleagues continue to stand up to the White House. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan said last week that he thinks the settlement fund is ”probably one of the most corrupt things that we’ve ever seen an American president do.”
It is “a bridge too far for some of my Republican Senate colleagues,” Peters said. “I hope they realize that what was done is simply unacceptable and that they’ll stand firm.”
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Associated Press writers Steven Sloan, Joey Cappelletti and Kevin Freking in Washington and Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.