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Senate Republicans may need more convincing from the Trump administration that the “anti-weaponization” fund is officially dead, even after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spelled out its doom on Tuesday.
Many Republicans demanded that the administration make it crystal clear that not only was the nearly $2 billion fund done, but that it would never come back. And at stake is a multibillion package to fund immigration enforcement operations.
During a closed-door meeting Tuesday, Senate Republican leadership assured members that Blanche would lay out the fate of the fund, and hoped that it would be enough to quell dissent among the ranks.
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And he did during a hearing in the House, where he repeatedly said that the administration was not moving forward with the fund.
“The reasons for the fund, I think, remain as important as they were before, but we are not moving forward with the fund,” Blanche said.
The fund was announced last month as part of a settlement between the Trump family and the Internal Revenue Service, and pitched as a mechanism for people who felt they were targeted by the government to get a financial kickback. Republicans were concerned that without proper guardrails, people convicted of assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill could access the taxpayer cash flow.
Some in the GOP wanted President Donald Trump to come out and officially kill the fund.
“I assume if Blanche is saying it, the president must agree,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said.
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But some Republicans want an even more concrete show from the administration that it’s actually dead and gone.
“I’m not sure that’s gonna be good enough for some people,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., contended that if the administration really meant it, it would support legislation to permanently prevent the fund from returning in any form. He planned to push an amendment to the broader, roughly $70 billion reconciliation package that would make sure of that.
“I just feel like we just need to do a Wayback Machine and just pretend like this never existed and take whatever steps are necessary to make sure it can never exist or disperse,” Tillis said. “Not in the current environment.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that Blanche previewed his remarks on the fund to him, and hoped that it would be enough to unite the fractured Republicans to move forward with budget reconciliation this week.
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“I think, as I’ve conveyed to you before, everything comes down to a function of math,” Thune said. “It’s do we have the votes? Do we have 50 votes to execute on getting a bill like that across the floor? Because we have to have Republicans hanging together in order to do that.”
Republican leadership hopes to launch the process on Wednesday in order to get the roughly $70 billion package to the House by the end of the week.
Some Republicans are hopeful that it will be enough to get the process back on track.
“If it goes like we’re told it will go, well, there’s a reasonable possibility, then we will move pretty quickly to the reconciliation,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said.
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Part of the issue is that if Republicans aren’t on the same page, several Democratic amendments that would both tackle the fund and halt momentum for the package could pass.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, was one of several critics of the fund, and she hoped that Blanche would make it “crystal clear that the administration is not going to proceed” with the issue. Whether she or others in the same camp would vote against amendments remained an open question.
“I’m not going to predict what’s gonna happen to a very fluid situation,” Collins said.