President Donald Trump may not be getting taxpayer money for his ballroom after all.
Senate Republicans on Wednesday indicated they expect the funds intended to secure the planned East Wing project to be stripped out of the single-party package because they lack the votes to include the money in the bill.
Adding to the troubles, Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, ruled that language fails to pass muster with the strict budget rules for what can be included in the $72 billion proposal for border security priorities.
“We’re going back to square one,” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy told NOTUS. “What I’m told is it’s not based on an interpretation by the parliamentarian. The votes are not there. If we go forward, we will lose.”
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North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis also said Republicans don’t have the votes to pass the funding, warning that if they go forward with it, it would needlessly subject Republicans to brutal Democratic attacks ahead of the November midterms.
“They should have never conflated the other legitimate Secret Service needs because it’s just giving everybody the ‘billion dollar ballroom’ and it’s just a bad idea,” Tillis told NOTUS.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged the struggle to lock down the votes, telling reporters that despite Trump’s calls to oust the parliamentarian, that is the lesser of the worries at present.
“There’s a couple of snags — snafus if you will — that we’ve run into,” he said after a caucus lunch. “There are issues related to the East Wing modernization project that are vote issues.”
“There may be some issues that relate to the parliamentarian, but most of the issues we have here are votes,” Thune said earlier Tuesday.
The $1 billion fund, initially proposed for Secret Service operations through 2029, included $220 million for security projects at the White House East Wing, where Trump is building a new ballroom. It’s unclear if some funding for Secret Service not related to the ballroom will still be included in the bill.
At issue, according to Thune, is whether just the pot for ballroom security, roughly $220 million, can be nixed or whether all $1 billion for the Secret Service would have to go as well.
“Those are all questions we’re trying to answer right now,” Thune said, adding that he is hopeful to have text nailed down later in the day.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is leading the reconciliation process as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said the details are yet to be determined.
“It’s all work in progress. We’ll see what happens when we get on the floor,” Graham said.
Republicans could begin voting on the package as early as Wednesday evening. Passing the bill will require a marathon session of votes on amendments, many of which will be proposed by Democrats targeting the funding for the ballroom, as well as Trump’s new $1.8 billion taxpayer-fueled fund for people who believe they were wrongly prosecuted by the federal government. The fund is expected to be available to people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and it has bipartisan opposition.
“Imagine that — a fund that is set up to compensate people who assaulted Capitol police officers?” Tillis said Wednesday. “People that had pled guilty to physical acts against the president may actually be able to get compensated.”
“How absurd is that sound coming out of my mouth?” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, fumed at the Senate parliamentarian in a post on Truth Social, urging Republicans to fire MacDonough in order to get the ballroom funding approved. But it’s clear they didn’t have the votes to pass it, even if she agreed to include it in the bill. In addition to Tillis, Republican senators with concerns about the ballroom funding include Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Curtis, and Rand Paul.
Thune said that even if they heeded Trump’s call to oust MacDonough, that would create larger problems.
“That would create even more vote issues here if we were to try to do something like that,” Thune said.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told NOTUS that Trump is making it harder for Republicans to execute on his agenda by inserting himself into how the chamber functions.
“He needs to butt out of the operational management of what goes on here in the Senate,” Murkowski said.
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