Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Congratulations to everyone who has waited in a long airport security line over the past week: You’ve finally gotten Congress’ attention. Nearly a month and a half after funding expired for the Department of Homeland Security—an agency that includes the Transportation Security Administration—a path has emerged in the Senate toward ending the partial shutdown.

The path, in short, is to fix airport lines now by teeing up what later could be the biggest legislative fight of the year. Just at the point when members of Congress and senators begin to check out of governance mode ahead of election season, Republicans are considering another party-line megabill that could fully fund ICE, pay for Donald Trump’s Iran war, and cut a check for whatever other items Republicans want to squeeze in before they risk losing control of Congress.

The developments to end the shutdown started over the weekend with a rejected offer.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune presented Trump with an plan to end the DHS shutdown. Congress could pass a bill funding the department with the exception of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Then, the Republicans could quickly move to a reconciliation bill—a vehicle that is not subject to the 60-vote filibuster—to fund ICE on their own. That would allow the party to get airport lines moving again, first, then deliver ICE its funding without having to agree to immigration enforcement reforms that Democrats have been demanding.

Trump said no. He insisted that no deals be cut with Democrats until Republicans had figured out a way to pass the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s flagship elections law that requires photo ID at the polls and proof of citizenship to register to vote. That bill has been under consideration on the Senate floor since last week, but it’s entirely for show: There’s no path to the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster for it, and Republicans don’t have the support among themselves to nuke or skirt the filibuster in order to pass it.

One day after Thune’s visit with Trump, though, a group of GOP senators offered a similar plan, but with an important tweak. The idea would still be to fund DHS, absent ICE, then pursue the ICE funding through reconciliation. But Republicans also pitched Trump that they would attempt to pass the SAVE America Act—or something in keeping with its spirit—in that same reconciliation bill. While the White House didn’t say anything about the offer, and the president didn’t post on social media about it one way or another, he was apparently warm enough to the idea that GOP senators worked around the clock to put together a bill.

“Well, I’m going to look at it,” Trump finally weighed in with reporters Tuesday afternoon. “And we’re going to take a good, hard look at it. I want to support Republicans.”

While convoluted, the plan seems promising only because it’s difficult to figure out what else Republicans would do. The sudden hustle and bustle from Senate Republicans to reach a deal suggests that the public is pinning the blame on them, the party in power, for the airport chaos. And yet, Trump won’t budge on anything until progress is shown on the SAVE Act, which has heretofore been jammed against an impenetrable wall in the Senate. There’s no easy answer to any of this. What the latest plan would achieve, though, is advancement, a leap from the chamber’s present logjams to new ones.

And both steps of this process—funding DHS, then doing a reconciliation bill—are arduous.

To complete the first step—reopening all the non-ICE elements of DHS—Republicans would need Democratic votes. But Democrats on Tuesday were cautious to provide them, suggesting that they would still need to see ICE reforms in a DHS funding bill in order to support it. This was incredibly frustrating to Republicans, who argued that you don’t get reforms to an agency if you’re unwilling to lend your votes to funding it.

But most of the problems are on the GOP’s side.

If “We’ll just pass the SAVE Act via reconciliation” sounds like a ruse, that’s because it basically is. Budget reconciliation is governed by strict rules, enforced by a strict parliamentarian, requiring that reconciliation items pertain to taxes and spending. The act is a policy bill—it requires this, requires that, bans this, bans that—not a budget bill. Republicans can try to square the circle by, say, offering federal grant money to states that implement voter ID or proof of citizenship, or tying existing grant money to such policies. Proposals are already circulating. But these are still tricky to get past the parliamentarian, and whatever could would likely lack the teeth of the actual SAVE America Act. In short: If moving this law through reconciliation could be done, it already would have been.

The conservatives pushing the elections bill were not taken in by the ruse.

“It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the bill’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, posted on X. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’ ”

“This is gaslighting,” the House Freedom Caucus posted. “The American people are not stupid and will not accept more failure theater from Republicans in Congress.”

Should the ruse prevail, though, Republicans’ reward would be a mountain of homework in the form of the reconciliation bill.

The possibility of doing another big reconciliation bill—Trump’s giant tax and Medicaid cut package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed through the process last year—has been a matter of dispute between the House and Senate. While House leaders have been more interested in it, Senate Republicans—as senators often are—have been more dismissive. Elections are nearing, and it would take an awful lot of discipline, discipline that may not exist, to get the House, Senate, and White House, all with their own problems, on the same page about party-line legislation.

Markwayne Mullin’s Confirmation Hearing Was the Funniest in Ages—and Might Have a Stunning Outcome

But if the Senate’s hand is forced into at least trying to satisfy Trump, it won’t be limited to funding ICE and fiddling around with election grant money.

The Pentagon is preparing to request a reported $200 billion from Congress for the Iran war, and reconciliation could become the vehicle for achieving that. That’s real money for an unpopular war, and Republicans would prefer not to shoulder that load on their own. If they had to approve that money on a party line, deficit hawks would request that all of that money be paid for with cuts elsewhere—and a messy fight about finding budget cuts would ensue.

Popular in News & Politics

Trump Just Caved On One of His Biggest Power Grabs

Senate Republicans Might Be Tricking Trump Into Ending the TSA Disaster

This is just the start. This could be the last time for a while that Republicans have control of the White House, House, and Senate, with the opportunity to pass big legislation without Democratic votes. Every member, with thin margins in the House and Senate, would have a lot of leverage. It’s a recipe for a mess, as all reconciliation bills—successful and unsuccessful—are. And there’s no guarantee that the final product would be popular. (The OBBBA polled about 20 points underwater around the time of its passage.)

Which is why the entire reconciliation-bill proposal itself might ultimately be a ruse as well. In his weekly press conference Tuesday, Thune merely mentioned that reconciliation was “available” to them, and that they could use it. He also emphasized, however, that Republicans had substantially “pre-funded” ICE in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is why the agency has remained funded through the DHS shutdown. If a reconciliation bill doesn’t get off the ground, or can’t pass, it wouldn’t leave a government agency unfunded indefinitely—meaning, it does not need to happen. And things that don’t need to happen in Congress typically don’t.

That reconciliation fight can all wait, though. The priority now is for members and senators to get home for Easter recess at the end of the week without having to arrive at the airport four hours in advance of their flights. And where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Get the best of news and politics

© Slate