The “Republican Revolt” Against Trump Fizzles
Inside the Senate for its most chaotic day of the year.
Approximately 364 days out of the year, the modern Senate is highly structured and predictable.
The 365th day is when they have a vote-a-rama. (Yes, it’s really called that.)
Let me try to explain how the Senate ended up with this bizarre, hours-long ritual, which I was inside the chamber to watch on Thursday.
The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was the law that set up the federal budget process. It envisioned Congress passing two budget resolutions each year, which would serve as blueprints laying out the topline levels of what the federal government would spend. The first crack at a budget resolution (which would be advisory in nature) would be passed in the spring; then the second (which would actually be binding) would be passed in the fall.
But, of course, there was always the possibility that fiscal circumstances would change between the two resolutions. Lawmakers needed a way to efficiently bridge any potential gaps between the advisory and binding budgets — so the 1974 law set up a process by which the chamber could pass a bill alongside the second budget resolution, to make changes to any laws that had been passed since the first budget resolution that deviated from the new spending target.
Most bills in the Senate are subject to unlimited debate unless 60 senators vote to invoke “cloture” (this is what’s known as the “filibuster” rule). But for this one bill, called a “reconciliation” bill because it would be reconciling the two budget resolutions, the Congressional Budget Act set a hard 20-hour limit on debate. 60 senators wouldn’t be needed to force a final vote; one would take place automatically after 20 hours of debate, since the framers of the 1974 law imagined that this bill would just be for minor changes, the type of thing that wouldn’t require unlimited debate. Just this once, a bill would be able to advance with the support of just 51 senators, instead of 60.
To make a long story short, Congress quickly gave up trying to pass two budget resolutions a year. (In fact, they hardly ever even pass one budget resolution as part of the annual spending process anymore.) But the reconciliation process remained in the law, a relic of a previous era of (much more precise) budgeting, but one that still allowed for bills to be advanced with just a simple majority — a powerful weapon as filibusters became more and more common.
Over time, the reconciliation process (originally intended to cut spending that had been passed in excess of Congress’ agreed-upon goals) has been used to pass some of the most expensive signature initiatives of recent presidents, like the final parts of Obamacare, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act under Biden, and the One Big Beautiful Bill last year. I guarantee you that if you asked almost anyone in Washington, they wouldn’t be able to tell you what the reconciliation process is actually supposed to be reconciling (although now you can!). But they know that, in a world where 60 votes are hard to scrounge together for partisan priorities, reconciliation is how slim majorities get their biggest policies accomplished.
For a long time, there was still a firm wall between the annual appropriations process (through which the two parties fund the government in a bipartisan way, at a 60-vote threshold) and the reconciliation process (which majority parties use to pass their partisan add-on priorities). That wall began breaking during the Biden era, and has now fully collapsed. Over the course of the last several months, Democrats have refused to fund the immigration enforcement agencies ICE and CBP through the regular appropriations process, so Republicans are now using the reconciliation process to fund the agencies in a party-line vote.
At about 4:50 a.m. this morning, the Senate passed the resulting Secure America Act, which would fund the two agencies for the rest of President Trump’s term, bypassing the regular appropriations process. (ICE would be given $31 billion through 2029; CBP would be given $13 billion.)
Why in the wee hours of the morning? Because there’s one more detail I didn’t mention. The “cloture” process that is normally used to shut off debate in the Senate (at a 60-vote threshold) also cuts off the amendment process for a bill. But because debate over reconciliation bills ends naturally, without going through the cloture process, there’s no way for majority parties to avoid amendment votes on a reconciliation measure.
So the majority party gains a powerful way to pass legislation. But the price is that they have to let the minority offer whatever amendments they want, a freedom that is normally tightly restricted. It’s the one day a year that the Senate cosplays as an open legislative body. In Washington, this rare amendment free-for-all is known as a vote-a-rama. (Outside of the two vote-a-ramas it has held for reconciliation, the Senate has allowed amendment votes on only three bills this year, out of the 100+ it has passed.)
Yesterday’s vote-a-rama took 26 amendment votes and 18 hours. Hanging over all of it was President Trump’s recent announcement of a $1.776 billion fund to be disbursed to his allies who argue that the Biden administration “weaponized” the government against them, potentially including those who were prosecuted for participating in the January 6th riot.
Normally, this is the sort of thing that senators from both parties would grumble about, but never be forced to vote on. But because Trump announced the fund right in the middle of the reconciliation process — the one time when anyone can force a vote on the Senate floor — he created the possibility that the vote-a-rama would be used to rein in the “anti-weaponization” fund.
So, just to sum up: We have a process that was created to make technical changes but has ballooned into a powerful legislative tool, completely accidentally. It isn’t normally used to fund regular agencies like ICE, but because the minority party refused to, it’s being used for that purpose this year. Because of a quirk buried inside an already quirky process, when the majority party uses it, the minority party can force votes on any amendments they want. And because it just so happened that Trump announced his “anti-weaponization” fund right as this process was kicking off, the Senate was actually going to have to vote on it — an accident of timing built on top an accident built on top an accident.
Before the vote-a-rama began, because there were so many GOP senators who were angry about the fund, there was significant talk of a coming “Republican revolt” against the president: a dramatic moment when Republicans would support a Democratic amendment undoing the “anti-weaponization” fund, which would have been one of the most significant moments of GOP legislators standing up to Trump this term.
Spoiler alert: that moment never came to pass. I spent all of Thursday at the Capitol, watching up-close as the promised “Republican revolt” started out with some momentum, but slowly fizzled as the day went on. Here’s what I saw: