It took more than two months, but Congress ended the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security last week, approving the same plan Democrats proposed in February. The final deal funded the entirety of DHS, except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which Democrats insist on reforming.
For the minority party, it was a victory of sorts — nearly all of the congressional Democrats stood firm, and GOP leaders ultimately accepted what Democratic leaders put on the table months earlier — but Republicans took the deal knowing that they planned to address ICE and CBP funding in a separate package, which they would advance through the budget reconciliation process, which would circumvent the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
It was against this backdrop that GOP lawmakers unveiled the details of their reconciliation bill, which included an unexpected element. NBC News reported:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, [on Monday night] released his committee’s part of the long-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol funding bill, which includes $1 billion for security features related to the White House ballroom.
The funding could not be used for non-security elements, according to the legislative text.
To be sure, the proposal isn’t just about the ballroom. On the contrary, Republicans are pushing a $72 billion reconciliation package that includes, among other things, more than $38 billion for ICE, roughly $26 billion for CBP and an additional $5 billion for DHS.
To the surprise of no one, the bill also ignores the reform measures Democrats began pushing after the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
But it’s the $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” to Trump’s ballroom vanity project that’s likely to be among the most controversial parts of the Republicans’ plan.
In case this isn’t obvious, the White House boasted last summer that the price tag for the ballroom would be $200 million, and every penny would come from private donations. By October, the price tag had grown to $250 million. Soon after, it was $300 million. Late last year, it was up to $400 million — though, again, the official line was that American taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the costs at all, even as the White House went out of its way to hide the identities of donors.
But in the wake of the recent incident at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham even led a group of White House loyalists in demanding American taxpayers pick up the tab for the president’s project, and now those demands have made their way into the party’s reconciliation bill.
Put another way, congressional Republicans expect the public to pay $1 billion for a $400 million ballroom.
We’ll learn soon enough whether and to what extent the legislation changes in the coming days and weeks, but for now, GOP officials should probably keep in mind that polls show 2-to-1 opposition to the White House ballroom project, and that’s when the survey question emphasized private financing. Watch this space.
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