A party-line tactic to ram legislation through Congress and bypass the Senate filibuster has become a dumping ground for Republicans’ legislative priorities throughout the year.
Now, as Democrats refuse to fund immigration operations, Republicans are once again readying a budget reconciliation package. The hard part will be getting enough of the GOP on the same page to craft a bill that can pass and survive the strict rules underpinning the process.
Republicans used the same process to pass President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” last year. It’s a time-consuming, labor-intensive legislative maneuver that nearly blew up and could fail unless both the Senate and House align on what exactly they want to include.
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Trump officially backed using reconciliation again this week as a way to skirt Democrats’ refusal to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as Congress inches closer to ending the ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown.
Trump demanded that Republicans get the bill on his desk by June 1.
“We are going to work as fast and as focused as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Still, Republicans have viewed reconciliation as a vehicle to tackle fraud, affordability, Trump’s tariff authorities, additional tax provisions, healthcare, funding for the Iran war, supplemental agriculture spending and election integrity measures in the months since passing the “big, beautiful bill.”
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has warned that if reconciliation is going to work — especially given the limited timeframe lawmakers have to start and finish the process — Republicans need to “keep our expectations realistic.”
“Our theory of the case behind all this was to keep that thing as narrow and focused as possible, and that maximizes the speed at which we can do it and the support for it,” Thune said.
“There will probably be some attempts to add things,” he continued. “There are things out there that, obviously, many of us are interested in. But on a reconciliation vehicle like this — which we need to move with haste, as the president has pointed out — it’s probably not a likely magnet for all these other issues.”
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told voters at an event this week in South Carolina that he is eyeing two new reconciliation packages, which could ease concerns about cramming all the GOP’s priorities into one massive bill.
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“We want to do it quick — ICE, Border Patrol — fund it as much as you can, multi-year,” Graham said. “Then there’s another one coming. I just made news. There’s another one coming in the fall, and that’s going to be about going after fraud.”
House Republicans spent their recent policy retreat earlier this year pushing a so-called “reconciliation 2.0,” gearing up to load the package with several provisions that could drain time and struggle to earn support in the Senate — where strict guidelines could kill proposals entirely if they don’t comply with the rules.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), which has long called for a second reconciliation bill, also wants to add proposals addressing affordability concerns.
“We support pursuing funding for military readiness and Homeland Security through this legislative process, while simultaneously codifying the president’s agenda to deliver lower costs for working families,” the RSC Steering Committee said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Some Republicans are also pushing to include the latest policy fight: the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The voter ID and citizenship verification legislation has no chance of passing the Senate given unified Democratic opposition.
It’s also unlikely to survive the Senate’s reconciliation rules, which allow only provisions that directly impact spending.
“I think we have to set our sights a little bit lower on this reconciliation bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “It’s got to be targeted to fund ICE for 10 years — I think that’s the number one thing for us. If we can nibble at the edges of the SAVE Act, that would be great, but the parliamentarian is not going to let us do the SAVE Act. That’s just an impossibility.”
Some of the loudest proponents of the bill in the House GOP acknowledge that adding the SAVE Act to reconciliation would be a challenge — largely because they would prefer to keep the bill intact and push it through the Senate.
“Look, it’s time for them to do a walk-and-talk and filibuster, and let’s make this thing happen,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said. “The American people are watching — piecing it together just to try to get a piece.”