But Rep. Andrew Clyde is angry that it’s taken the budget reconciliation process — which allows the majority party to bypass a Senate filibuster — to get it over the hump.
Senate Republicans early Friday passed the $70 million measure by a 52-47 vote. The bill funds ICE and Border Patrol through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term.
The House is expected to consider the bill early next week with several options. It can approve the Senate’s version unchanged and move it quickly to Trump’s desk; it can make amendments which would require further Senate approval; or it can delay action.
House leadership has mostly supported additional immigration-enforcement funding, but leaders will need to decide whether enough votes exist to pass the Senate version without modifications.
Budget reconciliation is a special Senate procedure that allows certain tax, spending, and debt-limit legislation to pass with a simple majority vote instead of the 60 votes normally needed to overcome a filibuster.
It’s the tool Republicans have used to move funding along while many Democrats contend that ICE has expanded deportation operations too aggressively under Trump. Senate Democrats cited concerns about immigration raids and enforcement tactics when they blocked earlier DHS funding legislation.
They say any large increase in ICE funding should come with significant restrictions, oversight requirements, or operational reforms. Republicans have largely rejected those conditions, leading to the current standoff over ICE funding.
“There is no reason that we should, through budget reconciliation, have to fund the ICE and Border Patrol. That's just that is not the way we do things here. It should be done through an appropriations process and not through budget reconciliation,” Clyde said on “Washington Watch” Thursday.
“But the Democrats are insane, and they refuse to fund these agencies. They refuse to protect our citizens. They refuse to secure our borders, and this is why we have to do it this way,” he told show host Tony Perkins.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole have repeatedly said they want to restore "regular order" by moving the 12 annual appropriations bills individually and earlier in the year.
House Republicans argue that large omnibus bills reduce transparency and force members to vote on thousands of pages of spending with little time for review.
There has been progress on the regular order front. Nine of the 12 bills have passed out of committee including two of them on Thursday, Clyde said.
“We are going to get these bills done. We're going to get them done before the end of June, which is the fastest that Congress has ever done this through regular order,” Clyde said.
The massive omnibus bills are a big reason the U.S. debt currently stands just shy of $40 trillion.
If House leadership can pass all 12 bills before the end of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, it will join a very exclusive club.
Complete funding through regular order has been achieved only four times since the creation of the modern budget process in the 1970s — 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997.
During the current Omnibus Era, a total of 330 appropriations bills should have been enacted. Only 25 have been enacted by Oct. 1.
So, leadership is looking to complete all 12 bills on time for the first time in almost three decades.
“Credit Chairman Tom Cole for that, for moving this process quickly forward and getting it done in the most conservative way possible,” Clyde said.
