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WASHINGTON (CN) — The fate of Senate Republicans’ marquee budget reconciliation bill remained unclear Thursday afternoon as a key GOP lawmaker maintained that he would not vote for the measure if it did not include restrictions on the Justice Department’s scuttled “anti-weaponization” fund.
The Trump administration said it had scrapped the proposed $1.8 billion settlement program this week in an apparent effort to get Senate Republicans to rally around the must-pass budget legislation. But a commitment from the Justice Department wasn’t enough to satisfy some of the fund’s most vocal GOP critics, who said that they wanted to see it slain by act of Congress.
The Senate convened to vote on the package of spending legislation which funds immigration enforcement agencies through the end of President Donald Trump’s second term. Lawmakers will slog through a raft of proposed amendments to the reconciliation measure, a process commonly referred to as a vote-a-rama and that is likely to take all day.
But the reconciliation bill will need some key GOP votes to pass, including that of North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who has long signaled that he would withhold his support if the measure does not include guardrails on the weaponization fund.
“It’s got to restrict it,” the Republican senator told reporters on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon.
So far, though, the Senate has yet to agree on an amendment accomplishing that goal. Lawmakers shot down one offering from Tillis that would have diverted most of the money for the weaponization fund to the Justice Department’s new national fraud enforcement division.
Just 12 Republicans voted in favor of the amendment, including Texas Senator John Cornyn and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy — both of whom recently lost primary elections to Trump-backed candidates.
Only three Democrats crossed the aisle to support the measure.
The Senate also scuttled a similar amendment offered Thursday morning by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which would have axed the Justice Department fund entirely. Tillis voted against that measure.
Cassidy, meanwhile, has offered his own amendment aimed at restricting the weaponization fund.
The Trump administration has for weeks tried to allay Republican concerns about the billion-dollar program, which has generated significant backlash from the president’s own party.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told House appropriators earlier this week that the Justice Department was not moving forward with the weaponization fund. But the top agency official said that he thought “the reasons for the fund” remained important and would not commit to rescinding it in writing.
The Justice Department last month said the $1.776 billion program — the result of a settlement agreement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service — would represent a “systematic process” to redress claims of government weaponization from anyone who believes they were unfairly targeted.
Critics of the fund, including Republican lawmakers, worried that it would effectively authorize taxpayer-funded payouts to violent criminals, such as those who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
And Blanche’s apparent refusal to formalize the fund’s cancellation, as well as some approving comments made about the program this week by Trump himself, don’t appear to have smoothed things over with GOP lawmakers already wary of the fund.
Cassidy on Wednesday signed onto an amicus brief filed in federal court which pointed out that the president has claimed the weaponization fund “has not been rescinded” despite the acting attorney general’s statement to Congress.
“The Anti-Weaponization Fund presents an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order and the authority of Congress,” the Louisiana Republican wrote in the brief cosigned by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. “The existence of the fund strikes at the core of Congressional authority and our Constitutional order.”
As of Thursday afternoon, the Senate was still debating amendments to the budget reconciliation bill — and any final vote on the measure was likely hours away.
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