Senate GOP looking for off-ramp from White House ballroom debacle

The Senate is gearing up for a battle over funding President Trump’s White House ballroom, which will take center stage when senators debate a budget reconciliation package this week to fund immigration enforcement operations through 2029.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough dealt a major setback to Republicans on Saturday by ruling that their plan to provide hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for Trump’s ballroom violated the Senate’s Byrd Rule and could not pass the Senate with a simple majority.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) hailed the parliamentarian’s guidance as a big victory but Senate Republicans are not about to quit on one of Trump’s biggest priorities. GOP leaders are revising the language so that it can avoid a 60-vote threshold on the floor, setting up a likely showdown when senators start voting on the bill Thursday.

“Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Ryan Wrasse, a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) posted on social media in response to the parliamentarian’s ruling.

Senate Democrats say they will try to knock any provision that could funnel taxpayer funding to the ballroom project if Republicans rewrite it.

“Republicans’ only focus has been funding Trump’s ballroom and throwing tens of billions more taxpayer dollars at ICE and Border Patrol without any reforms or accountability – all while providing $0 in cost relief to American families,” Schumer said in a joint statement with other senior Democrats in response to the parliamentarian’s guidance.

“Democrats are prepared to challenge any future language the Republicans try to pass to use taxpayer dollars to fund Trump’s ballroom,” they declared.

The brewing fight is a political headache for the GOP leadership and vulnerable Republicans who will have to take tough votes on keeping any ballroom funding that survives a Byrd-Rule challenge in the budget reconciliation package.

A group of Senate Republicans have privately made it clear to Thune that they don’t want to vote on providing up to $1 billion for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom, but Thune is under pressure to deliver on one of Trump’s top priorities.

Sen Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s closest allies in the Senate, said the president constantly talks about the importance of building the ballroom in his conversations with the South Carolina senator.

Some Senate........

© The Hill