Are Republicans Trying to Hoodwink Trump on the SAVE Act?

Emine Yücel released a report this morning on a new “agreement” being worked out in the Senate that would attempt to resolve the airport situation. This proposal would fund most DHS – including TSA – without funding ICE enforcement operations.

Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, as part of a reconciliation bill that, under Senate rules, can only pass with 51 votes. This means that the Republicans will not need the Democrats to pass their project.

The deal is similar to how one might have predicted it would end for weeks. But this includes a strange and emerging point: Republicans could Also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.

The SAVE America Act — a sweeping voter suppression bill — has been something of a chaos maker for months now, scrambling Texas Senate primaries and, more recently, scuttling the last attempt at a deal in the Senate to end the partial government shutdown. Trump asked Republican senators not to make a deal with Democrats and instead sent ICE to airports to support the TSA, his idea of ​​a solution.

Politico reports that yesterday Trump agreed to support this new deal to partially end the DHS shutdown, provided Republicans incorporate aspects of the SAVE Act into a reconciliation package.

But budget reconciliation is only intended to be used primarily for budgetary matters. A sweeping voter suppression bill is not about the budget. No way. So what’s going on here?

Some Senate Republicans argue there is a way to pass the SAVE Act through budget reconciliation. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) suggested earlier this month at his conference that he hire “a really smart lawyer” to figure it out. This hypothetical individual could supposedly “help us craft a SAVE law that can survive a Byrd bath,” the process by which the Senate parliamentarian removes from a reconciliation bill any measures that do not qualify for reconciliation.

Republicans could also refuse to comply with the parliamentarian’s decisions. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), during the latest reconciliation process, made it clear that he did not want to break with precedent and was doing so.

As one of our budget experts, Bobby Kogan, explained to Emine:

“The essence of the Save Act cannot be done under reconciliation unless you are willing to break the rules of reconciliation,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.

Kogan explained that Republicans could “pay states to voluntarily change their rules, to do certain things in the Save Act,” but they are trying to set “binding national requirements, and those kinds of things are either non-budgetary in some cases or just incidental in other cases” and cannot be addressed in the reconciliation process.

“There is a deeper political problem,” Kogan added. “If you can fix very, very minor issues, can they claim they won? Or does that further infuriate people who know that’s far from what they’re really looking for?”

Passage of the SAVE Act would be a disaster for American democracy. But we’re not sure that’s actually what Senate Republicans are doing.

We’ll be watching to see if this is a genuine attempt to pass the SAVE Act, or an effort to kick the can down the road, get rid of Trump, and disclaim responsibility when they find out that – even with a few smart lawyers – they can’t get the SAVE Act done using reconciliation after all.