On Tuesday, as part of a weird press conference, Donald Trump again endorsed a Republican effort to secure public funding for “security” measures related to his ballroom vanity project. A day later, a reporter asked him whether he was concerned about Congress giving up on the proposal. He said he was not.
Hours later, it became clear that he should have been. The New York Times reported:
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said [the taxpayer money] for President Trump’s White House ballroom project has been stripped from a filibuster-proof budget bill because there were not sufficient Republican votes to support the funding. “We’re back to square one,” he said, adding: “The votes are not there. We will lose.”
The entire trajectory of this fight has been bizarre for a while. For months, Republican officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill assured the public that the ballroom project would be privately financed. Two weeks ago, however, the party’s position changed unexpectedly, and GOP senators unveiled a package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which included a provision for millions in taxpayer dollars related to the ballroom.
The proposal was expected advance through the budget reconciliation process, which meant Republicans could circumvent the 60-vote threshold and pass the bill with a simple majority.
Roadblocks quickly emerged. In order for a reconciliation bill to advance, it has to meet a series of stringent conditions, which in this case proved to be a problem: The Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian informed GOP leaders over the weekend that the money for the ballroom would either have to be changed significantly or removed altogether.
The party’s initial response was to keep working on delivering the money that the president said was necessary, but as Wednesday got underway, the scuttlebutt in the upper chamber was that Republicans would have no choice but to remove the funding provision — not for procedural reasons, but because too many GOP senators didn’t want to vote for the unpopular idea, including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who announced his opposition to the expenditure shortly after losing his primary.
To be sure, there’s still some fluidity to the process. But as things stand, according to a key member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republicans are walking away from their own unpopular idea. Watch this space.
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