South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham laid out a list of demands Friday that he said would enable him to relent and allow swift action on a $1.2 trillion package of full-year appropriations for several Cabinet departments and a temporary patch for another.
The Republican senator pressed for a commitment on separate votes at a later date on two of his top priorities.
One is Graham’s bill to criminalize the behavior of local officials who lead “sanctuary cities” that don’t help enforce federal immigration policy. Another is a proposal he hasn’t introduced yet that would bar federal investigators from acquiring the telephone records of members of Congress in court-sanctioned probes without notification.
A demand for votes in exchange for lifting holds is a typical trade between members and leadership, and suggests that the Senate is moving closer to reaching a unanimous agreement to speed up the process.
It wasn’t yet clear if Senate leaders would sanction Graham’s requests. And his hold wasn’t the only one, as leadership on both sides was still trying to clear a path to a time agreement.
“We’re still working on a couple of things but we’re getting closer,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Friday afternoon.
The Senate is aiming to pass a package of five full-year fiscal 2026 spending bills — Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, Financial Services, National Security-State, and Transportation-HUD — along with a two-week extension of funding for the Homeland Security Department.
Democrats had demanded the full-year Homeland Security bill be stripped from the package and replaced with a short-term extension to allow more time for negotiations following the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by federal immigration enforcement agents.
Leaders need unanimous agreement to pass the measure Friday, ahead of a midnight deadline when current funding for many federal agencies is set to expire. Objections from Graham and others dashed leadership hopes for passing the package Thursday night, forcing a rare Friday session.
Graham’s first request is a vote on a bill he introduced Thursday that would require state and local officials to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
He wants that vote to occur in the next two weeks, in conjunction with action on a final fiscal 2026 Homeland Security spending bill, if a deal is reached by the new Feb. 13 deadline in the stopgap language drafted by Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine.
The bill would require state and local officials to notify federal authorities if they release from custody individuals not legally in the country and would impose criminal penalties on officials who release those individuals from custody if they go on to kill or seriously injure someone.
“Sanctuary city policy is dangerous. It’s insane. It needs to be fixed,” Graham said in a floor speech laying out his conditions. “I am demanding that that my solution to fixing sanctuary cities at least have a vote.”
The second vote Graham is seeking is on language that would limit the government’s ability to search the phone records of members of Congress and would allow more people to sue the government over former Special Counsel John L. “Jack” Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
The spending package under Senate consideration repeals a provision of last year’s spending law ending the government shutdown that would allow payouts to GOP senators whose phone records were searched without their knowledge.
Graham said Thursday that his demands were “not about me” and that he was fighting for the 190 “private groups [that] had their phone records messed with.” He said that vote doesn’t need to occur in the next two weeks, but within a reasonable time frame.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his leadership team inserted that provision into the mammoth spending bill before it passed the House earlier this month, partly to quell a revolt on the rule vote which could have stopped the legislation cold.
Graham took direct aim at Johnson for that move in his Friday floor speech.
“To Mike Johnson, you jammed us,” Graham said. “You better never do this again, because what I’m going to do is introduce legislation, and I’m going to challenge you to take it up.”
Pocket rescissions
Demands from other senators also need to be satisfied before a unanimous consent agreement can be secured on the spending package.
Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley is pushing for a vote on his amendment that would prohibit the use of so-called pocket rescissions, a legally contested budget tool used by the Trump administration to claw back previously appropriated funds in the closing days of a fiscal year — giving Congress little time to object.
The Trump administration withheld nearly $4 billion in fiscal 2025 foreign aid spending using the tactic, under which an administration puts a 45-day hold on funds and subsequently lets the funding lapse at the end of the fiscal year. Despite legal pushback, the Supreme Court effectively allowed it last fall.
Democrats have repeatedly railed against pocket rescissions, saying the move both erodes the congressional power of the purse and serves as an obstacle to bipartisan funding agreements since an administration could unilaterally undo a deal.
Reductions-in-force
Another simmering issue appeared to get resolved, at least for the time being.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he had assurances that language from the November stopgap funding law preventing the administration from conducting mass layoffs while the continuing resolution was in effect would carry over in the current bill.
That means no new “reductions-in-force” between when the measure is enacted and Feb. 13 would be allowed.
“So now I got to fight to continue it with whatever we do at the end of the two weeks,” Kaine said Friday.
Next steps
If the Senate can pass the revised spending package Friday, the House will have to take it up next week, likely Monday. The House Rules Committee could meet as soon as Sunday to consider the package.
House Democrats are expected to widely back the bill, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said the two-week window for Homeland Security funding would keep the urgency on lawmakers to negotiate changes to immigration enforcement policy.
“There’s urgency to dealing with this issue because ICE, as we’ve seen, is out of control, and the American people know it,” he said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Jeffries said Democrats need “bold” changes at the Homeland Security Department, including requiring agents to take off masks and to wear body cameras, among other proposals.
“Absent a path to accomplishing dramatic change and making sure that ICE and DHS are conducting themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country, the Republicans are going to cause another government shutdown,” he said.
But reaching an agreement on a full-year Homeland Security bill within two weeks will be a tall ask. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said Friday that Democrats’ demands would be “robbing us of the power to enforce our immigration laws.”
“Illegal presence becomes permanent by default, not because Congress voted for it, but because enforcement has been made impossible,” he said. “You don’t actually have to pass a law called amnesty to get the same effect.”
Aris Folley and Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.
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