ICE Funding Bill Crashes Into Ballroom, Crime-Droog Slush Fund. How Sad!
Also, Thom Tillis's 'Stupid on stilts' is front-runner for best phrase of 2026.
Senate Republicans didn’t have enough votes Thursday to pass their own filibuster-proof reconciliation bill to fund Donald Trump’s mass deportations, so instead they set the bill aside for the time being and got out of town to take the week of Memorial Day off.
Why yes, it’s Republicans in Disarray again! The bill was supposed to be an easy way around Democrats’ longstanding opposition to ICE and Border Patrol funding, because a reconciliation funding bill only requires a simple majority. But with Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the toilet and midterm elections coming up, there weren’t even 49 Republican senators plus John Fetterman willing to pass the $72 billion funding bill.
While Republican senators are still very excited to support Trump’s ethnic cleansing agenda, just enough members of the caucus are pissed off at Trump to crash the bill. Some were mad about the inclusion of a billion dollars for Trump’s stupid vanity ballroom/drone empire base, and quite a few are repulsed by Trump’s big patriotic $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off January 6 droogs and other Trump crime friends.
On top of that, several old school Republican senators are feeling some serious bad vibes over Trump’s support for primary challengers against their colleagues Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas. Cassidy came in third in his primary last weekend, turfed out of his seat by a Trump-backed chud whose name we won’t bother looking up. And just before next Tuesday’s runoff in the Texas GOP primary, Trump this week endorsed Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for which Democratic nominee James Talarico is undoubtedly very grateful. Senate Republicans, not so much.
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Before Trump’s DOJ announced the crime droog slush fund Monday, Senate Dems had been gearing up to slow down the ICE bill by attaching dozens of amendments that would drop or restrict funding for “security” for the ballroom project. Over the weekend, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that $1 billion in additional funding for the ballroom didn’t meet the guidelines for bills passed by reconciliation. Trump, naturally enough, demanded that Republican Majority Leader John Thune shitcan McDonough for treasoning the one thing Trump cares about.
Republicans then rewrote parts of the bill so the extra billion would go to funding for the Secret Service, without actually saying “ballroom,” but by Wednesday, enough Republicans were getting fussy about the bill that Semafor reported that Republicans were ready to pull funding for the ballroom, a report also backed up by The New York Times.
Cassidy, his tongue suddenly much freer now, told reporters he wouldn’t vote for the ballroom, no thank you, noting that his constituents in Louisiana tell him they have more important things on their minds: “I mean, they can’t afford groceries and gasoline and health care,” Cassidy said. “And we’re going to do a billion dollars for a ballroom?”
By Thursday, though, even more Republican senators were defecting over the slush fund, with the loudest complaints coming, as usual, from members who aren’t seeking reelection and don’t have to worry about being primaried (although death threats from random MAGA-Americans remain a worry).
Former Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who did so much to get us in this mess by refusing to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, belatedly found just enough spine to condemn (acting) Attorney General Todd Blanche’s giveaway to the rioters. He even managed to call it a slush fund in his statement: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick.”
Hey, that’s what we’d say about a GOP senator who refused to hold a president responsible for inciting all those very same people to come to the Capitol and assault cops! We wonder how things are going in the various universes where a wholly different version of Mitch had found 10 Republicans willing to convict Trump?
Another safely departing Gooper, Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina), offered what’s sure to become the go-to phrase for describing his own party going forward, saying the slush fund was “stupid on stilts”:
Tillis also said, in a separate interview with Spectrum News, “It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayers dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned and now we are going to pay them for that. That’s absurd.” Tillis, who will never have to worry about running for Senate again, bravely added, “When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that's tyranny, and that's what that account is.”
A Republican Senate aide told NPR that if Thune had allowed the ICE bill to go to the next stage in the reconciliation process, the “vote-a-rama” where unlimited amendments can be added by either party, a likely Democratic amendment limiting or halting the slush fund likely would have gotten enough votes to pass. However, another GOP aide “with knowledge of the discussions” said that wasn’t likely, and instead said leadership hoped that waiting until after the recess to vote would give GOP leaders more time to work something out.
Even Thune grumbled that the vote had been needlessly complicated by the sudden creation of the slush fund, and Trump’s insistence on funding for the ballroom.
“It was something that was supposed to be very narrow, targeted, focused, clean, straightforward, and it got a little bit more complicated this week,” Thune said, expressing his frustration. “It makes everything way harder than it should be.”
Oh well. You knew he was a snake when you invited him in, now didn’t you?
[Guardian / Reuters / NOTUS / CNBC / Semafor / NYT]
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"Colbert is finally finished at CBS," Trump wrote. "Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he's finally gone!"
***
Translation: I hate Colbert because he has been beloved for decades and I know I am so hated that the world will celebrate my death.
More kittens is always the right answer.