Robert C. Byrd, the father of the arcane Senate budget process and a famous stickler for the chamber’s rules, was not happy in 1985 when some of his colleagues began tucking extraneous items into special budget bills to dodge the filibuster.
“Such an extraordinary process, if abused, could destroy the Senate’s deliberative nature,” Mr. Byrd said in a floor speech in which he scolded his colleagues about misusing a legislative weapon that was supposed to be deployed sparingly.
It is safe to say that Mr. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who was also the chairman of the Appropriations Committee before his passing in 2010, would be even more dismayed today. Stymied by Democrats on funding President Trump’s immigration crackdown in the normal fashion, Senate Republicans are muscling through legislation to provide more than $70 billion by employing the special budget exemption that was never intended to be used that way.
They ran into a significant obstacle on Thursday as efforts to pass the measure before Memorial Day collapsed when Republican senators rebelled over Mr. Trump’s plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claim they were victimized by the Justice Department. Fearing a politically charged fight with Democrats, Republicans abruptly called off the debate. But they still intend to pursue the legislation next month when Congress returns.
Republicans have seized on budget reconciliation — a process that was created to make it easier to do the politically risky work of cutting spending or raising taxes by shielding such measures from filibusters — to overcome Democratic resistance to funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Even one of the masterminds of the current approach concedes it is not the way it is supposed to be done.
“You have an appropriations process that failed,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the Budget Committee. “What am I going to do? Go back home and say I have to sit on the sidelines when I have the power to do something about it? If I have the power to get money for the Border Patrol and ICE, I’m gonna do it.”
Yet some of his Republican colleagues are questioning exactly why funding is being approved this way. They fear that the approach could become routine whenever political resistance pops up, undermining the traditional appropriations process — which requires some degree of bipartisan consensus because spending bills need 60 votes to advance — as lawmakers seek the easy way out.
“Why is it in a reconciliation package as opposed to just being priorities within the regular appropriations process?” asked Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, referring to Secret Service funding the White House requested be included in the bill. “If this was a priority for the administration, why was this not included in the president’s budget request that came out a couple of months ago?”
Democrats assail the whole enterprise as a gross abuse of the budget law that will have severe consequences in the future while limiting Congress’s role in overseeing how money is spent.
“The Republicans are turning reconciliation into an appropriations bill process,” said Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee, who noted the original legislation that created reconciliation was passed unanimously in 1974. “Not one was against it. Why? Solely it was reserved for reducing deficits.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat who has sat on the Budget Committee in both the Senate and the House, said the Republican approach “is taking a wrecking ball to the whole process.”
He warned that Democrats would be within their rights to employ the same tactic if they regained power.
“What goes around comes around,” he said.
Democrats did include direct spending in their huge Covid-era reconciliation bill during the Biden administration, though the scope of that legislation went much further.
Republicans then turned around and included significant spending for immigration enforcement last year in their sweeping policy legislation that extended tax cuts and cut social safety net programs.
But the current bill represents a new frontier entirely. It consists solely of spending for immigration enforcement and a few other administration priorities, with no attempt to reduce the impact on the deficit by cuts elsewhere or offset the spending in any way.
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, conceded that “this reconciliation bill is not like any other that we’ve done before.” He blamed Democratic resistance for leaving Republicans no alternative.
Democrats refused to back money for Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown after the White House refused to place restrictions on enforcement tactics following the killings of two American citizens by federal immigration agents.
“The principal objective in this reconciliation bill is to ensure that ICE and C.B.P. are funded, not only today, but for the foreseeable future, given the unwillingness of the Democrats to do anything to enforce the law in this country or to provide resources for our law enforcement efforts in this country,” Mr. Thune said this week. “And that’s why we are where we are.”
The reconciliation process has evolved over the decades as the two parties have tried to employ it to their best advantage. Senate Republicans made another substantive revision last year by voting to ignore the $3.8 trillion cost of extending Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and declaring that doing so did not add to the deficit — a major deviation from precedent.
That change, engineered by Mr. Graham, cleared the way for permanently extending the tax cuts without having to offset the cost, as would otherwise have been required under the previous interpretation of the rules.
Back in his day, Mr. Byrd devised a process that would allow senators to challenge elements of the budget bills that didn’t qualify for a filibuster exemption. That led to what became known as the “Byrd bath,” in which the legislation is scrubbed for errant provisions. This year, the Senate parliamentarian axed $1 billion in security funding for the White House ballroom, among other items, but allowed the rest of the measure to move forward.
Republicans agree with Democrats that their move is apt to have lasting consequences as the polarized Congress increasingly cannot come to terms on spending bills.
“The one thing that I told my Democratic friends is if we can’t reach agreement on how to appropriate and one party has reconciliation available to it, this is going to be the new normal,” Mr. Graham said in an interview. “If you don’t watch it, reconciliation becomes appropriating by another name. I personally don’t want that.”
Mr. Merkley said the only way to prevent such a slide was to refrain from bending the rules in the first place.
“This is something that we will see reverberating for years to come,” he warned, “the steady destruction of the norms and processes of the Senate, destroying bipartisan collaboration on spending bills.”
