Senate Republicans approved $70 billion for immigration enforcement in the early hours of Friday morning, overcoming a grueling voting marathon that became a referendum on President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund.
After a stream of amendment votes that began on Thursday morning and lasted into the night, the Senate passed the measure without a ban on the $1.8 billion fund, which sparked a bipartisan backlash over the prospect of Jan. 6 defendants getting payouts.
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Senate leadership was able to keep most Republicans in line after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche scrapped the fund and stated it would not be revived in congressional testimony earlier this week.
But not all Republicans were satisfied, and several attempted to codify that promise into law. One of the GOP senators, Bill Cassidy (R-LA), spent hours trying to craft an amendment that could be adopted at a simple majority vote, but those efforts did not ultimately pass muster with the parliamentarian.
Instead, the amendment failed at a 60-vote threshold toward the end of the “vote-a-rama,” with six Republicans joining Democrats to block the fund and repurpose it to compensate Capitol police officers injured in the line of duty. The immigration enforcement bill now heads to the House, where Republicans will bring it to the floor next week.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Republican to vote “no.”
Friday’s vote brings Republicans one step closer to neutralizing the issue of immigration, a political lightning rod after the fatal shooting of two protesters in Minneapolis, for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
Democrats refused to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement without reforms to officer conduct, prompting Republicans to go it alone with a filibuster-skirting process known as reconciliation.
The rocky path it took to get there has deepened a rift with the White House and stretched Senate Republicans to their limit. Initially, Trump requested the Senate attach security funding for his East Wing ballroom to the bill, but that money was jettisoned as Republicans expressed concern about being linked to what Democrats have denounced as an expensive vanity project.
The “anti-weaponization” fund was an even greater hurdle, but Republicans found a workaround amendment on Thursday afternoon that did not threaten the fate of the immigration bill. The compromise, authored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), blocked the fund and redirected the money to assist the DOJ’s fraud task force, an effort that Democrats opposed.
A dozen Republicans voted for that amendment, but it failed without Democratic support.
All of the Democratic-led amendments also failed, although vulnerable Republicans repeatedly broke with their party on language designed to put them in a tough spot electorally.
Democrats peeled off seven Republicans with an amendment blocking taxpayer and private dollars from going to the ballroom. Five Republicans voted for another amendment preventing Tina Peters from receiving a payout from the “anti-weaponization” fund.
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Peters, a Trump ally convicted in a vote tampering case related to the 2020 election, earned a commutation from the governor of Colorado in May.
As the vote series stretched into Thursday night, Susan Collins (R-ME) cast the 10,000th vote of her Senate career, earning praise from GOP and Democratic leadership. Collins, a centrist running for reelection in Maine, has never missed a vote since arriving in the Senate in 1997.
The Senate ended the night with an unrelated vote to extend a key spy power known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That procedural step failed with six Republicans joining Democrats in voting “no.” The outcome, a protest over the degree of surveillance reforms, means that leadership will need to regroup and try again next week, when the 702 authorities are set to expire.
