The big news recently was that the Senate left early for Memorial Day without undertaking a necessary vote-a-rama to fund ICE and CBP due to concern over the so-called 1776 Fund. It came on the heels of an apparently heated meeting with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche and growing concerns that they didn’t want to take hard votes on the fund in the vote-a-rama.
It’s a tough issue because both sides have some merit. The fact of the matter is that Democrats have abused settlements for over a decade as a means to reward their ideological allies outside the congressional appropriations process. Opponents of the president claim those slush funds were different for various optical or formalistic reasons, but they weren’t. Just because the president is being somewhat more brazen about it (as is his wont) doesn’t mean that they’re not all doing the same thing: resolving litigation collusively in order to funnel money to fellow travelers.
Congressional Republicans have opposed this for years, introducing bills like the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act, and have gotten precisely nowhere. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a regulation to halt the practice and it was repealed by attorney general Merrick Garland. Then-ranking member of Judiciary, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and his members hammered Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and Vanita Gupta on this issue and were essentially told to pound sand. Grassley pinned Gupta down on this particular issue and she fell back on the “sweeping” settlement power of the attorney general.
Later in the Biden administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a sweetheart settlement with the ACLU to give every illegal alien in a family affected by the first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance enforcement priorities $450,000 from the Judgment Fund. Then-Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Grassley were able to torpedo the plan but it was the optics of it that got Biden to stop it, not the merits of doling out millions to illegal aliens with no input from Congress.
In other words, Democrats are okay with this as long as their side is seeing the money. It’s not about constitutional principle but rather about Lenin’s eternal question — “who? Whom?” So you can see why the administration would say that there can’t be two sets of rules, with slush funds being okay for Democrats but not for Republicans.
At the same time, Senate Republicans are right to be concerned that the fund is large and unstructured enough that some really bad people will get payouts from it. Now, I’d bet money that some really bad people got payouts from the Obama and Biden funds, too, but the national press was doing its best to ignore those.
Here, in contrast, the press will have each payment under a microscope. So even with prudent guardrails like that proposed by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) — no money to people who attacked cops — they’re right to assume that creeps and criminals will get federal money and the elected representatives will be held to account for it because they didn’t stop it. You can’t hold it against politicians not wanting to get caught in a bad political situation. Others also just think this is plain-old wrong.
But the current standoff is untenable. However understandable those political (and in some cases moral) concerns may be, Senate Republicans are refusing to fund ICE and CBP. Given the likely Democrat control of at least one house of Congress next year, ICE and CBP need to be funded now for the rest of the Trump administration. Future CRs will simply not include that funding and a negotiated ICE appropriation will put outrageous restrictions on necessary interior enforcement.
In other words, Senate Republicans are so mad at the president that they’re taking their own policy priorities hostage. It’s the sheriff in Blazing Saddles putting the gun to his own head; that only works in Mel Brooks movies.
But there seems to be an obvious solution here: ban settlement slush funds. Don’t ban the 1776 Fund. Don’t put guardrails on it. Just ban all of them, like Republicans have been trying to do for over a decade. An enterprising member should just write that bill, get cosponsors, and introduce it. If Democrats really want to stop Donald Trump from giving Ed Martin 1.7 billion dollars to dole to his friends, they should support that bill. If they don’t then they’re the ones playing politics in order to keep their piggy bank well stocked.
On the other hand, if Republicans continue to focus on the current proposal they play into Democrat hands on why non-appropriated slush funds are actually good unless the wrong president is using them for the wrong reasons.
If Republicans revert to their principled position on stopping all slush funds it will let them address the issue of the day that has them rightly concerned while also freeing them up to fund necessary law enforcement. They need to step back and see that it’s not all about Trump; it’s about policy.
There’s a path for them to pursue sound immigration and DOJ-reform policy if they’re willing to separate the issues from the man in the White House. If they remain fixated on who/whom, like the Democrats, they may end up shooting their own policy hostage.
Mike Fragoso is a columnist at the Washington Reporter.
