On the menu today: Audrey Fahlberg here, National Review’s political reporter filling in for Jim Geraghty this week. Noah Rothman will be in your inbox tomorrow.
‘Nuclear Dust’ Mission?
President Donald Trump is weighing a U.S. ground mission to extract roughly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday evening. According to U.S. officials, he’s also pushing his national security team to urge Iran to surrender the uranium in exchange for ending the war. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters, “They’re going to give us the nuclear dust,” and Iranian officials must give the U.S. what it demands or “they’re not going to have a country.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that the president is “prepared to unleash hell” if necessary.
And he issued a new threat to Iranian energy sites on Monday. “If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached” with Iran’s “new, and more reasonable, regime,” and “if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely “stay” in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!),” Trump wrote in a Monday morning social media post.
The U.S. military buildup in the region means that there are now reportedly more than 50,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East, or about 10,000 more than usual, according to the New York Times. Trump has told allies he wants to wrap up the conflict soon and that he’s hopeful his national security team can abide by the four-to-six week timeline that he laid out at the start of the war, the Journal reported last week. But starting a war is easier than ending one.
Partial DHS Shutdown Continues After Lawmakers Returned Home for Recess
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives jetted home over the weekend after passing a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security for eight weeks that is dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate, where 60 votes are required for passage. The House GOP’s passage of a DOA funding bill comes after the Senate jetted home on Friday after advancing their own bill in the wee hours of the morning to fund parts of DHS, except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border protection — legislation that the House declined to take up on the grounds that it doesn’t fund key components of the department’s immigration enforcement.
The continuing standoff means the shutdown is expected to last at least two more weeks until lawmakers return from their Easter and Passover recess. “House Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Friday afternoon. “This gambit that was done last night is a joke.”
And House Majority Leader Steve Scalise insists GOP senators are experiencing buyer’s remorse over their own bill, Politico reports:
“Well we actually read their bill and, frankly, a number of senators have expressed buyer’s remorse with what they did at 3 in the morning,” Scalise said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “So we looked at it. One of the things that we had real concerns with is that it actually defunds over 25 percent of the baseline operations at DHS.” . . .
“We sent a bill that was short-term. It’s not exactly what we want, but at least it allows everybody to get paid — all the agencies, TSA, everybody — while we negotiate our differences,” Scalise told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “We have very big differences between the House and the Senate.” Scalise did not say which Senate Republicans might have changed their minds after the DHS vote.
Congressional Democrats have spent weeks opposing Republican efforts to reopen the department in protest of the two federal immigration-officer-involved fatal shootings earlier this year. Republicans call Democrats’ immigration enforcement demands unreasonable and have accused their colleagues of constantly shifting the goal posts amid stalled negotiations.
The now record-breaking shutdown of the department began on February 14 and has metastasized into a political disaster for Republicans. The House and Senate are trading blame over who is at fault, with immigration hawks blaming Senate Majority Leader John Thune for pushing a bipartisan bill that would fund the department except for ICE and CBP, the two sub-agencies that received billions of funding in last year’s reconciliation bill. From the Wall Street Journal:
Many rank-and-file House Republicans said they felt they were being jammed with a last-minute bill by the Senate, and they weren’t going to accept it.
“A lot of frustrations,” said Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.). He called what the Senate passed a “turd sandwich.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) said it was “absolutely offensive to the people that we represent that the Senate would send over a bill that doesn’t fund Border Patrol and the core components of ICE.”
Some conservatives said the bill should include voter-ID rules, part of a separate legislative package that Trump has at times insisted be joined with the DHS measure. But other GOP lawmakers said the House should accept the Senate plan, and that an eight-week DHS funding bill would simply put them back in the same situation in two months—headed into a midterm election that is already looking difficult for the party.
Democrats rejected funding for DHS last month as they sought to block money for ICE and impose tighter rules on immigration-enforcement tactics, such as requiring agents not to wear masks and to obtain judicial warrants before forcing entry into a home. The party’s approach developed after two U.S. citizens were killed in confrontations with immigration agents in Minnesota.
Trump is preoccupied with the war in Iran and has been less involved than usual in the negotiation process. He did, however, sign an executive order to fund TSA employees, and border czar Tom Homan said on Sunday that ICE officers will continue their presence in airports until they are “in a posture where they can do normal operations.”
Pressed on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday whether he thinks the president should force lawmakers to come back to Washington to reopen the department, Homan said: “Well look, I hope so. . . . We’re in an increased threat posture because of what’s going on around the world. We’ve got to keep this country safe.”
“We just need to get the Department funded,” Homan added. “They want to talk about immigration policies, we can talk about that, but why do you got to hold the rest of the DHS hostage to be able to do that? Let’s sit down and talk.”
ADDENDUM: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the president’s birthright citizenship case on Wednesday. “He has gotten trounced in the lower courts, and several conservative Supreme Court justices have already hinted, through little-noticed cues, that they may be skeptical, too,” the Wall Street Journal reports.