The $70 Billion Surrender

Republican Senators (Save Lisa Murkowski) Chose Deference Over Duty

6/6/26

Republican legislators in the House and the Senate amaze me. These people are in position to

protect America from the excesses and abuses of a narcissistic, vindictive president; but what they’ve shown is that they’re perfectly content to sit on their hands and allow Trump to do whatever he can to turn America into a shit-hole country.

The vote in the Senate to appropriate an additional $70 billion for immigration control operations is emblematic of the problem. I say, “additional $70 billion,” because an initial $139.5 billon had previously been authorized for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the Orwellian named One Big Beautiful Bill. It certainly makes me wonder why additional funds are being requested at this time, when the original authorization was supposed to be covering a five-year horizon.

In any case, the fact is that Democrats tried to add amendments to accomplish two things. One sought to impose conditions on ICE and CBP to reign in excessively aggressive tactics, ban the wearing of masks and the concealing of identities, and require warrants before entering any residences. The second was an unrelated effort to definitively prohibit the creation of any “anti-weaponization fund,” – i.e., the slush fund that Trump was seeking to pay off those who either pled guilty or were found guilty of participating in the January 6th assault on the Capitol.

I don’t get it. For reasons that are unclear to me, few seem to recognize that policies relating to improving security at the border are distinct from policies having to do with how we deal with undocumented residents already here – particularly those who have been here for some time with well-established family and community connections. Trump’s preferred border policy seems to be to close the border, altogether, with the sole exception of letting in white South Africans. How can that be seen as anything other than racist, particularly since the policy closes the door on the Afghans who supported our service members in our war in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the thousands of people around the globe who, under long-standing prior practice, would have legitimate justification for seeking asylum?

As far as the policy relating to undocumented immigrants, Trump wants to kick them all out. I think it’s safe to say that most Americans would be comfortable if the effort were to target “the worst of the worst,” but current practice has gone far beyond that. At this point, ICE has targeted undocumented immigrants of all stripes, subjecting them to the risk of being separated from their families and communities and detained or deported, irrespective of how long they may have lived among us, their family status, their contributions to their communities, or where they might be in the process of seeking a green card or citizenship.

The appropriate policy is obvious, and it’s not so hard. Objective criteria as to what qualifies as “the worst of the worst” need to be codified, and only those who satisfy these criteria should be subject to the possibility of deportation. Even there, those detained should be guaranteed due process and allowed to challenge the prospect of having their lives disrupted and their liberty compromised. Beyond the basic fairness concern, scaling down the population of undocumented immigrants that ICE targets would virtually eliminate the wasteful expenses planned for building and maintaining unnecessary concentration camps (which is what these detention centers are), as well as the cost of sustaining a population that, in the main, poses no threat to public safety.

While the second effort to amend the legislation had nothing to do with immigration or the border, still…. This attempt was intended to preclude the creation of Trump’s slush fund to pay off the felons who assaulted the Capitol. Such a fund would be so transparently inappropriate, it’s astonishing that the Senate wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to kill it once and for all. This is especially relevant because, although acting DOJ head Todd Blanche has said this fund is no longer under consideration, Trump himself hasn’t corroborated that assertion.

How we got here is as follows: Trump sued the IRS, seeking a $10 billion judgment (billion with a B) for damages he claimed arose because a contract worker at the IRS had leaked his tax returns to the press. Let’s be clear, every president in modern times has voluntarily released his tax returns, and Trump even had promised to release his. Somehow, however, while the release of such information posed no hardship on those other presidents, for Trump, the release of those records fostered not just a little harm, but rather harm to the tune of $10 billion! That’s ridiculous on the face of it.

The suit should have been dismissed out of hand at the onset. $10 billion? Why not $20 billion? Why not $100 billion? This claim was so ludicrous that no one should have taken it seriously. And yet the Justice Department (obviously under the thumb of DJT) not only took it seriously but used it as an excuse to “settle” by establishing a sham of a fund to reward Trump loyalists with money that Congress never authorized or appropriated. Not only that. The “agreement” also stipulated that Trump, his companies, and his family members would be granted immunity from IRS oversight and tax audits. I’ve said this before about the treatment of Trump: So much for the concept that no man is above the law. It’s not even aspirational any longer. Republican legislators seem to be doing all they can to facilitate Trump’s being the exception.

As it turned out, the funding bill passed without remedial constraints imposed on ICE or any stipulation prohibiting the establishment of a fund that would pay off Trump’s felonious followers. It passed 52 - 47. All the 52 were Republicans. The 47 were all Democrats plus a lone Republican: Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. (Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado missed the vote.)

As I said at the start of this blog, I’m astonished. Existing practices on the part of ICE and the CBP are extreme, out of control, and not serving the national interest; and we have a Department of Justice that seems ready to open the gates to support Trump’s basest tendencies, irrespective of laws, norms, or morals. Republican Senators are choosing complicity and disregarding their oaths to the Constitution. How has it come to this?

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