Senate GOP is kickstarting budget reconciliation to fund ICE. Here's how that works.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is seen at a hearing on April 16. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Senate Republicans introduced a budget resolution Tuesday to fund immigration enforcement agencies, the first step in a lengthy budgetary process to end a record-breaking partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

For months, Congressional Democrats have said they will not fund Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless significant reforms are made, following the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents earlier this year.

Republicans are looking to a budget tool called reconciliation to fund the remaining DHS agencies along party lines, bypassing the need for Democratic support.

The first step in that process is a budget resolution, which Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., unveiled Tuesday.

The resolution would authorize the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees to draft legislation that would increase the deficit by up to $70 billion each. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the final price tag is expected to be $70 billion total. That figure is expected to fund the agencies for 3.5 years.

President Trump has given a deadline of June 1 for the bill's passage.

But reconciliation can be a complicated and lengthy process. Here's a look at what's involved.

What exactly is reconciliation?

Let's start at the beginning. Bills need to pass both chambers of Congress to become laws.

In the House, a bill passes when at least 218 members (half of the 435 representatives plus one) support it. In the Senate, most bills need the support of at least 60 senators. Republicans currently have 53 seats.

"It's nice to have the Senate majority, and you get pretty titles and gavels, and you can nominally control the floor, but as Schoolhouse Rock! would tell us, unless you have 60 votes for most things, you can't move forward," Liam Donovan, a political strategist, previously told NPR.

One way to get around that 60-vote threshold and avoid the threat of a filibuster is budget reconciliation, a tool made possible because of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Reconciliation allows the party in control to pass legislation with a 51-vote simple majority in the Senate. The aim is to make it easier for Congress to make adjustments to laws that either bring in revenue or change spending levels.

It was first used in 1980 for the 1981 fiscal year and is not used every year.

"It's become the preferred tool over the past 25 years in this modern, partisan political era," said Donovan.

Republicans used reconciliation to pass tax cuts in 2017, and Democrats used it to pass elements of then-President Joe Biden's agenda, like the COVID-19 relief package and the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, Congressional Republicans used reconciliation to pass President Trump's signature legislative vehicle, the One Big Beautiful Bill.

How does it work?

Reconciliation is a two-stage process.

It starts with a budget resolution that gives instructions to congressional committees to write legislation that achieves certain budgetary outcomes. For example, a resolution mightinclude instructionsto the Committee on Armed Services to report changes in laws within its jurisdiction that result in increasing or reducing the deficit by a certain amount.

Once the budget resolution passes out of committee, the committees that received instructions get to work.

The Budget Committee then incorporates all those bills into one big bill that's considered by the House and the Senate.

If there are disputes between the chambers, they have to resolve them.

Why do I keep hearing about vote-a-ramas?

Vote-a-ramas can be dramatic and drawn-out affairs where senators take up a marathon of amendments ahead of a final budget vote.

They begin in the Senate when debate on the bill ends. Senators essentially keep offering amendments on the bill until they run out of amendments — or steam — and decide to stop.

It is a rare chance for the party in the minority to bring legislation to the floor and is an opportunity for senators to try to undo parts of the budget resolution through objections known as budget points of order.

There are two vote-a-ramas in the course of the reconciliation process: one on the budget resolution, which is less consequential, and the second on the final proposed legislation itself.

"The amendments that happen in the final legislative package are really important — you're playing with live ammunition when you're on that final stage of reconciliation," said Donovan.

Why wouldn't reconciliation be used all the time?

There are limits to budget reconciliation. It's used to make changes to the debt limit, changes to mandatory spending or adjustments in revenues. It cannot be used for discretionary spending.

There's also what's known as the Byrd rule, named after former Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

The rule allows anything determined not to have a direct budgetary consequence to be removed from the bill. The goal behind this is to prevent reconciliation from being used for measures unrelated to the finances of the federal government.

In other words, reconciliation is about money going out from the federal government and the money it takes in.

If a senator thinks a provision in the bill doesn't pass muster with the Byrd rule, the senator can raise a "point of order." The Senate parliamentarian advises the presiding officer on whether the provision violates the rule.

This could include anything that doesn't result in changes to spending or revenues, doesn't cause changes to Social Security or doesn't raise the deficit beyond the point of the budget window, which is usually 10 years.

This story is adapted from an earlier story, which can be found here.