** 5/21/26 - Senate GOP Turns on Trump, Freezes ICE Bill...............
Buzz Sawyer
Senate GOP Turns on Trump, Freezes ICE Bill
By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015This was supposed to be the week when first the Senate and then the House whipped through a budget-reconciliation bill on party-line votes. Its original purpose was pretty simple: to pre-fund immigration-enforcement activities beyond the end of Donald Trump’s second term without addressing any of the restraints on ICE or Border Patrol that Democrats have been demanding for months.
The timing could not be clearer: Trump himself announced on Truth Social that the deadline for getting the bill on his desk was June 1. With a Memorial Day recess on tap, it all had to get finished before the weekend. But instead, this happened:
Jake Sherman is probably right that the breaking point between Republican senators and the White House was the president’s announcement of a bizarre, possibly illegal, and sure to be unpopular $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off alleged victims of Biden-administration “weaponization” of federal agencies like the IRS. There was instantaneous bipartisan Senate interest in adding language to the reconciliation bill restricting or even killing the slush fund, and it’s likely that provoked a violent reaction from the White House and hardcore congressional MAGA folk.
That’s not the only problem that might have led to this the decision to ice the ICE funding bill. Trump was also demanding a cool billion in “security” money for his very unpopular White House ballroom project as part of the reconciliation bill. When the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian nixed the money on technical grounds, Trump reportedly told Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire her, which would have created a huge firestorm in Congress. Thune refused. The truth is, Thune and other GOP senators probably wanted to give the parliamentarian a nice bottle of wine for getting rid of the troublesome ballroom provision.
More generally, Senate Republicans are probably feeling fed up with the president right now. Many of them are infuriated with him for his sudden endorsement of Ken Paxton’s challenge to their beleaguered colleague John Cornyn, very much against their advice, in next week’s Texas U.S. Senate runoff. Others are upset at Trump for violently and repeatedly stepping on the GOP’s midterm “affordability” message, focusing instead on his grievances and on what many of them privately consider a no-win war against Iran.
However you slice it, the reality is that what began as a “skinny” ICE-focused budget-reconciliation bill designed to move quickly and smoothly through Congress has been blown up by Trump’s personal agenda. He told them to show some discipline on this bill but couldn’t take his own advice.
We don’t yet know whether this revolt against Trump represents a temporary storm that both sides will move past after some posturing or the beginning of a more serious rift between the president and his foot soldiers. Among the rebels are the people whose electoral fate in November will determine how Trump’s second term ends. Intraparty divisions are the last thing Republicans need as they try to fire up the party base to save their control of Congress.