Avoiding the Issues
Congress keeps dodging ICE and Iran; Senate legislative appropriations starts up this week
The prospect of congressional debate about the conduct of immigration enforcement agencies feels as remote as the midwinter chill during this week’s heat wave. Democrats’ gambit to force a response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection violence on the frozen streets of Minnesota’s Twin Cities by withholding votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security is petering. Republican leadership has accepted a two-track plan to use budget reconciliation to fund ICE and CBP and a regular appropriations bill to fund the rest.
The Senate had decided to move on from that debate, fund DHS, and allow ICE and CBP to operate with money already allocated through a previous reconciliation process. The House Freedom Caucus saw even this decision as a surrender and now, with Senate assistance, will aim to take immigration enforcement completely off the table for appropriators for the remainder of Trump’s term, if not years beyond.
Appropriators in both chambers are warning of the consequences of this decision. Although both parties have stretched its original purpose and used reconciliation to get agenda-defining legislation over the finish line, party-line funding for immigration enforcement threatens to routinize a two-track appropriations process during united government that would further stifle congressional debate and compromise. Deciding how to allocate federal resources, after all, is the most important process of collective decision making in which Congress routinely engages. Shifting to regularly funding partisan priorities independently from that process brings the executive and legislative branches closer into alignment in an area the Constitution clearly intends political separation. Appropriators have the deepest understanding of the broader importance of maintaining those norms.
The trouble is that the appropriators (and everyone else) are being outflanked by the best-organized and most-muscular faction within the House Republican conference – the Freedom Caucus. Speaker Mike Johnson regularly has acted in accordance to their demands, including swiftly re-jamming the Senate when it passed DHS funding and left town. Wednesday, HFC endorsed the ICE+CBP reconciliation plan “to ensure Democrats can never again take our nation’s security hostage.”
We won’t know how many congressional Republicans also have concerns that ICE is becoming an unaccountable and unfettered security force. Republicans who may question or oppose a secret police force rampaging through American communities, continuing to shoot unarmed people and allow their deaths in detention, have not generated the proportional factional leverage to respond. Although it may be a fair point that they risk political fire from the president in doing so, many of their re-election prospects look dim anyway because of the collapse of Trump’s support, including on this very issue. They essentially are choosing to go down without a fight.
CONGRESS AND IRAN
The congressional role concerning the war in Iran, meanwhile, is not being explored sufficiently for a different set of political structures and motivations that are no less diminishing of the institution. As Paul Kane explores in his first column for NOTUS, it is unprecedented that Congress has not held a public hearing on a military action of such a scale, recalling that the Republican-controlled Senate held six oversight hearings within the first 10 weeks of the Iraq War on top of prewar hearings held by Democrats.
Back then, committee chairs still had the gravitas and sense of obligation to conduct oversight even with a copartisan in the White House. It could be part of a political brand for a moderate like Senator John Warner or Richard Lugar. Now, the personal incentives are to stick with the Trump brand for the majority given the president’s control of the governing agenda. It’s also likely the case that targeting Iran has significant support among Republican members given its near half-century as a pariah state.
For their part, Democratic leadership seems more alarmed by the process by which the administration entered into the war than the decision to bomb Iran. Leadership in the House signaled as much by trying to introduce a war powers resolution during a pro forma session, which checked the box of messaging to the base but wasn’t even recognized by the chair. The Senate will attempt a similar introduction this week. But as we know, the post-Vietnam checks on executive warpower are shells of their original design because of the courts.
For members concerned about the process and specifics of the Iran war, the options are limited. After Trump announced his genocide countdown last week, some started discussing the procedurally burdensome 25th Amendment. Rep. Jamie Raskin has reintroduced a resolution to create a congressional commission authorized by Section 4 of the amendment to assess the mental and physical fitness of the president for office, something he’s been advocating for over a decade.
The only avenue with realistic chance for impact left is politics. We don’t know what will be most effective, but members most concerned about the Iran war likely should start by organizing into a cohesive bloc. Maybe they can persuade the Pentagon to provide a briefing by doing so.
Two more congressional actions on Iran still loom. Any agreement to cease hostilities that involves Iran’s nuclear program or lifts sanctions likely would need congressional approval under a 2015 law. Also, the War Powers Resolutions requires congressional approval of military action that lasts longer than 60 days, with a possible 30-day extension. Excluding the current cease fire, that deadline would be May 31. Some congressional Republicans have expressed interest in holding a vote on the extension.
The constitutional point of involving the legislative branch in questions of war and peace isn’t to give opponents of an action the opportunity to stop it. The framers of the Constitution wanted more minds in important decision-making processes to hedge against what we moderns call groupthink, or merely the natural human instinct to go along with the boss’s bad idea out of self interest. Congress isn’t employed by the president and – at least on parchment – and members have their own interests to look out for. The idea was that an independent set of decision-makers could make sure the executive branch had thought everything through. Historically, it’s even worked both ways as presidents have had to bat down congressional foreign policy imperatives.
This constitutional arrangement also posits some accountability for the outcome upon Congress as well. Perhaps this is why leaders in the majority have avoided any direct institutional engagement on the president’s actions against Iran.
The profound strategic impact of the war, however, is not going to let them dodge it. Because the administration viewed the Iranians as NPCs in their own national defense, they did not take the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as a credible outcome. The administration may be trumpeting how it pummelled Iran when other presidents wouldn’t, but this scenario is partly why they didn’t. This weekend’s peace talks collapsed with Iran still controlling traffic through the strait, a reversal of the freedom of the seas that has been a pillar of American foreign policy since the administration of John Adams. It’s why the navy has fought pirates since 1801. Freedom of seas is why the U.S. maintained a two-ocean navy during the Cold War, to ensure the essential flow of trade and resources needed to sustain a global alliance network confronting Soviet expansion could be sustained.
Frankly, these six weeks have produced one of the largest and most unnecessary strategic blunders in American history, empowering Iran regionally and globally much more than the prewar status quo and actively harming the economies of friendly nations and our own. The solution either is to give Iran even more of what it wants or conduct a longer and far bloodier war. We also don’t know if the current bombing campaign has significantly disrupted the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which apparently was not “obliterated” by Operation Midnight Hammer.
By not fulfilling the constitutional backstopping role, congressional majorities are in the soup with the administration. They will catch the political flack from the next bad idea. Most importantly, they are not positioned to deter whatever level of violence lay behind Trump’s threat to destroy the entire Iranian civilization. That’s a level of irresponsibility that honestly is sickening.
APPROPRIATIONS
The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee will launch its work this week with a budget request hearing for the Congressional Budget Office, Government Publishing Office, and the Government Accountability Office Wednesday at 3:00 PM in Dirksen 138. We covered these agencies’ requests at the House-side hearing in March. GAO was the only one to request a significant budget increase ($48.2 million, a roughly 5% bump), which has seen flat budgets since FY 2024.
Given its size, mandate, and highly-professionalized staff, GAO often feels the most squeeze from tight legislative branch budgets. Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown told House appropriators that the agency would still shed about 140 positions even with a budget increase to manage costs. During that hearing, Rep. Steny Hoyer nudged the coy Brown unsuccessfully to reveal what GAO really needs to be maximally effective. Senators will have another opportunity to explore what level of support would have the most benefit to congressional oversight.
Not all states and foreign governments that employ an auditing agency similar to GAO rely exclusively on appropriated funds to support it. Senators could ask whether GAO could explore alternative funding sources for its work and what types of options the office may have investigated that fit its mission.
At the latest Congressional Data Task Force meeting, GPO mentioned a new collaborative project with CBO to format some of its projection models into USLM XML, which would make them interoperable with other legislative branch datasets and useful to legislative branch app developers. With both agencies in the room, it’s a fine chance to hear more about this intriguing partnership.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will be on the Hill this week to discuss the president’s FY 2027 budget request. He will appear in front of the House Budget Committee on Wednesday at 10:15 AM in Cannon 210 and the Senate Budget Committee Tuesday at 10 AM in Dirksen 608. Members will have the opportunity to ask if he intends to follow appropriations law in the coming fiscal year.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Now that she has been fired, the Justice Department is refusing to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of former Attorney General Pam Bondi. She was set to appear for a closed-door deposition on Tuesday.
Stephen Bannon is on the verge of having his contempt of Congress conviction dismissed after Supreme Court approval.
The House Ethics Committee has announced a public hearing to consider sanctions for Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick on April 21 at 2:00 PM in Longworth 1310.
In case you missed Daniel’s weekend essay on Congress’s institutional challenges to holding members responsible, even when they prey on their employees, please read it.
“Sickening” indeed! Total irresponsibility.