After a marathon vote-a-rama that dragged from Wednesday night into the early hours Thursday, the Senate adopted a GOP budget blueprint to provide roughly $70 billion to fund immigration enforcement agencies through President Donald Trump's term.
This comes as the Department of Homeland Security has faced a record-breaking partial shutdown, after Senate Democrats refused to fund the department unless major policy changes to immigration enforcement were made, following the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents earlier this year.
Because compromise between the two parties is off the table, Senate Republicans are turning to a budget tool called reconciliation, which would enable them to fund immigration enforcement agencies without the need for Democratic support. It's a lengthy and arduous process. It's been used by both parties to implement major priorities along party lines, including President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Ultimately, Senate Republicans ultimately adopted the plan with a 50-48 vote. GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined Democrats in voting against the measure. Two senators were absent for personal reasons
The resolution would authorize the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees to draft legislation that would increase the deficit by up to $70 billion each. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the final price tag is expected to be $70 billion total. That figure is expected to fund the agencies for 3.5 years.
The budget measure now heads to the House of Representatives, which must also adopt the resolution before committees can draft the actual legislation. There's already been a push from some House Republicans to expand the scope of the effort, something that could complicate leadership's plans. Any changes the House makes would then have to go back to the Senate, where the chamber would have to undertake another vote-a-rama.
President Trump has given a deadline of June 1 for the bill's passage.
Reconciliation can be a complicated and lengthy process. Here's a look at what's involved.
What exactly is reconciliation?
Let's start at the beginning. Bills need to pass both chambers of Congress to become laws.
In the House, a bill passes when at least 218 members (half of the 435 representatives plus one) support it. In the Senate, most bills need the support of at least 60 senators. Republicans currently have 53 seats.
"It's nice to have the Senate majority, and you get pretty titles and gavels, and you can nominally control the floor, but as Schoolhouse Rock! would tell us, unless you have 60 votes for most things, you can't move forward," Liam Donovan, a political strategist, previously told NPR.
One way to get around that 60-vote threshold and avoid the threat of a filibuster is budget reconciliation, a tool made possible because of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
Reconciliation allows the party in control to pass legislation with a 51-vote simple majority in the Senate. The aim is to make it easier for Congress to make adjustments to laws that either bring in revenue or change spending levels.
It was first used in 1980 for the 1981 fiscal year and is not used every year.
"It's become the preferred tool over the past 25 years in this modern, partisan political era," said Donovan.
Republicans used reconciliation to pass tax cuts in 2017, and Democrats used it to pass elements of then-President Joe Biden's agenda, like the COVID-19 relief package and the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, congressional Republicans used reconciliation to pass President Trump's signature legislative vehicle, the One Big Beautiful Bill.
How does it work?
Reconciliation is a two-stage process.
It starts with a budget resolution that gives instructions to congressional committees to write legislation that achieves certain budgetary outcomes. For example, a resolution might include instructions to the Committee on Armed Services to report changes in laws within its jurisdiction that result in increasing or reducing the deficit by a certain amount.
Once the budget resolution passes out of committee, the committees that received instructions get to work.
The Budget Committee then incorporates all those bills into one big bill that's considered by the House and the Senate.
If there are disputes between the chambers, they have to resolve them.
Why do I keep hearing about vote-a-ramas?
Vote-a-ramas can be dramatic and drawn-out affairs where senators take up a marathon of amendments ahead of a final budget vote.
They begin in the Senate when debate on the bill ends. Senators essentially keep offering amendments on the bill until they run out of amendments — or steam — and decide to stop.
It is a rare chance for the party in the minority to bring legislation to the floor and is an opportunity for senators to try to undo parts of the budget resolution through objections known as budget points of order.
There are two vote-a-ramas in the course of the reconciliation process: one on the budget resolution, which is less consequential, and the second on the final proposed legislation itself.
"The amendments that happen in the final legislative package are really important — you're playing with live ammunition when you're on that final stage of reconciliation," said Donovan.
Why wouldn't reconciliation be used all the time?
There are limits to budget reconciliation. It's used to make changes to the debt limit, changes to mandatory spending or adjustments in revenues. It cannot be used for discretionary spending.
There's also what's known as the Byrd rule, named after former Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
The rule allows anything determined not to have a direct budgetary consequence to be removed from the bill. The goal behind this is to prevent reconciliation from being used for measures unrelated to the finances of the federal government.
In other words, reconciliation is about money going out from the federal government and the money it takes in.
If a senator thinks a provision in the bill doesn't pass muster with the Byrd rule, the senator can raise a "point of order." The Senate parliamentarian advises the presiding officer on whether the provision violates the rule.
This could include anything that doesn't result in changes to spending or revenues, doesn't cause changes to Social Security or doesn't raise the deficit beyond the point of the budget window, which is usually 10 years.
This story is adapted from an earlier story, which can be found here.
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