Senate Republicans ignore Trump’s pleas, strip ballroom funding from key bill
A couple of weeks ago, as part of a weird press conference, Donald Trump again endorsed an effort to secure public funding for “security” measures related to his ballroom vanity project. Asked one day later what would happen if Congress didn’t approve the $1 billion in proposed funds, the president told reporters, “Then the White House won’t be a very secure place.”
The unsubtle message was meant to send a clear signal to Capitol Hill, especially his ostensible Republican allies, not only about what he expected them to do but also about why he saw the money as necessary.
It didn’t work. Bloomberg reported:
Senate Republicans stripped federal funds for Donald Trump’s White House ballroom from a spending package after the money triggered a backlash from lawmakers in both parties.
The removal of the funds Wednesday is a fresh setback for Trump who a day earlier Senate Republicans forced to scrap a $1.8 billion fund to pay allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the government.
The entire trajectory of this fight has been bizarre for a while. For months, Republican officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill assured the public that the ballroom project would be privately financed. In early May, however, the party’s position changed unexpectedly, and some GOP senators unveiled a package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which included a $1 billion provision that, if approved, would spend taxpayer dollars related to the ballroom.
The proposal was expected to advance through the budget reconciliation process, which meant Republicans could circumvent the 60-vote threshold and pass the bill with a simple majority.
Roadblocks quickly emerged. In order for reconciliation bills to advance, they have to meet a series of stringent conditions, which in this case proved to be a problem: The Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian informed GOP leaders a few weeks ago that the money for the ballroom would either have to be changed significantly or removed altogether.
The party’s initial response was to keep working on delivering the money that the president said was necessary, but it became apparent that Republicans would have no choice but to remove the funding provision — not for procedural reasons, but because too many GOP senators didn’t want to vote for the unpopular idea, including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who announced his opposition to the expenditure shortly after losing his primary.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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