U.S. Senate to move ahead on budget process overhauling immigration, border security

by Jennifer Shutt, Louisiana Illuminator
February 5, 2025

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate Budget Committee plans to mark up a budget resolution next week, starting off the long and likely arduous reconciliation process the GOP hopes it can use to pass sweeping changes to border security and immigration policy.

Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, announced the markup on Wednesday, moving ahead of the House, which had hoped to move a budget resolution through committee this week.

“To those who believe that Republicans should fulfill their promises on border security, mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens: I agree,” Graham wrote in a statement.

“That is why the Senate Budget Committee will be moving forward next week to give the Trump Administration’s Border Czar, Tom Homan, the money he needs to finish the wall, hire ICE agents to deport criminal illegal immigrants, and create more detention beds so that we do not release more dangerous people into the country.”

Graham said the reconciliation bill “will be the most transformational border security bill in the history of our country.”

Budget blueprint

Congress’ budget resolution is a tax and spending blueprint that lays out lawmakers’ vision for the 10-year budget window. It doesn’t contain any actual federal spending.

The House and Senate must agree to adopt the same budget resolution before Congress formally unlocks the reconciliation process that will enable Republicans to enact their policies without Democratic support.

While the GOP controls both chambers of Congress, Senate rules require at least 60 lawmakers vote to limit debate on major bills. Republicans hold 53 seats at the moment, shy of the supermajority needed to move legislation through the regular process without Democratic buy-in.

The reconciliation process, which has strict rules in the Senate, allows the GOP to get around that 60-vote requirement as long as the various elements of the package address revenue or spending in a manner not deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. Reconciliation bills also cannot change Social Security.

One bill or two?

Senate Republicans moving first on a budget resolution doesn’t guarantee the House will vote to adopt the same budget resolution, especially if it only contains reconciliation instructions to address border security and immigration policy.

House GOP leaders have pressed for months for Congress to move all of their policy goals, including those addressing tax and energy, through one reconciliation package.

Senate Republicans, including Graham, have said the party should write two separate reconciliation packages with the first focused on border security and the second addressing taxes.

While the House and Senate don’t need to work out all the policy details of the eventual reconciliation package in the budget resolution, they must agree which committees will get reconciliation instructions and what those instructions will say.

Vote-a-rama looms

Once the Senate Budget Committee votes its budget resolution to the Senate floor, GOP leaders will need to dedicate floor time to debating the resolution. But before the upper chamber can take a final vote on the budget resolution, senators will need to undertake the vote-a-rama; typically an all night marathon session, where senators from both parties put up dozens of amendments to the budget resolution.

Democrats will use the process to put senators facing challenging reelection prospects in 2026 on the record on policies that could cause them issues, either during a primary or a general election.

After that, the Senate’s budget resolution would go to the House, where GOP leaders could choose to adopt it, or to make changes, which would require it go back to the Senate

The House could also bring its own budget resolution up in its Budget Committee, bring that through the floor and then go to conference with the Senate.

That’s all before the House and Senate begin to debate the actual reconciliation bill with the actual policy changes in committees and on the floor.

Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said last month he hopes the entire process will be wrapped up before the end of May.

House GOP leaders have an especially narrow margin to work within, holding just 218 seats at the moment, compared to Democrat’s 215 members. There are currently two vacancies that will be filled by special elections later this year.  

Last updated 4:47 p.m., Feb. 5, 2025

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