Senate Funding Deal Comes Together And Then Falls Apart, Trump Has Lost The Argument on ICE (Badly), Dems Must Stay On Offense, Don Lemon Arrested!

We need to honor the bravery and courage of the people of Minnesota and keep contacting our Congressional reps, keep fighting to rein in ICE

Since publishing this morning we’ve learned that journalist Don Lemon has been arrested by the regime. This ain’t “de-escalation peeps.

And this sure ain’t de-escalation either:

I’ve started a thread on Bluesky to follow this breaking news about Trump’s “de-escalation.” Follow me there. Now back to the today’s post…..

Morning all. Yesterday the Senate and White House came together around a deal to pass 5 appropriations bills and a separate two week continuing resolution (CR) for the DHS appropriations bill, giving Congress two weeks to negotiate new restrictions on ICE. As of this morning the deal is stalled because Lindsay Graham threw a tantrum last night. Here’s Punchbowl:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) emerged as the primary obstacle to a fast floor vote late Thursday night. Graham railed against the funding package over a House-passed measure repealing a provision tied to senators whose phone records were obtained by the Justice Department as part of its 2020 election probe.

Senate leaders will try again today to secure an agreement to pass the massive $1.2 trillion, six-bill package, although any individual senator can drag out the floor process for days.

There’s a serious time crunch, with funding expiring at midnight for a big chunk of the federal government. Yet even then, the House likely isn’t returning until Monday, with no guarantee the chamber can pass anything. Hill leaders and the White House hope to avert a full-blown funding crisis for the Pentagon and other key departments.

Senate Democrats and the White House reached an agreement earlier Thursday to strip funding for the Department of Homeland Security from the six-bill package and replace it with a two-week stopgap measure to allow for negotiations over ICE restrictions. The House’s unanimous repeal of the senatorial payouts provision remained in the DHS text, however.

Graham stormed into Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office late Thursday night, demanding it be removed. He later complained to reporters about the House’s move.

Graham’s crusade on this issue — he was one of the GOP senators whose phone records were secretly subpoenaed by DOJ — has become a lonely one. Plus, if Graham got his way, the funding package would face resistance in the House.

Leaving the Capitol last night, Thune told us that there were still “snags on both sides.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer complained that “Republicans need to get their act together,” but he declined multiple times to say whether there are any Democratic objections.

The Senate is convening at 11 a.m. and will try again to clear the funding package. Without an agreement from all 100 senators, it would take a few days to pass the measure.

Even if the Senate were to come to a deal today and pass the 5 appropriations bills and DHS CR, funding would run out for these parts of the federal government because The Cowardly and Idiotic Speaker keep the House out this week, this week of all weeks. Yes just showing up for work continues to be a problem for the soon to be former Speaker. As of now the House doesn’t return until Monday night. A reminder that by law Congress was required to have a fiscal year 2026 budget in place by September 30th, 2025. That was four months ago. We are already a third of the way into this new fiscal year and this MAGA Congress has not done it’s most essential job - pass a budget.

Meanwhile we are now having the debate about reforming, overhauling, and reining in ICE we all wanted to have. The Senate Dems have coalesced around a plan that would ban masks, require use of body cameras, require ICE agents to show ID and identify themselves, establish clear use-of-force and a uniform code of conduct, require judicial warrants, require coordination with state and local law enforcement, require independent review of killings and other serious incidents.

Meanwhile in the House the New Democratic Coalition and the Progressive Caucus released a joint set of proposed reforms:

1. Ensure ICE and CBP immediately leave Minneapolis and stop terrorizing American cities and communities;

2. End arrests without judicial warrants and, outside of exigent circumstances, arrests at sensitive locations such as churches, shelters, schools, and courthouses;

3. Ensure full, independent, and transparent investigations into all DHS-related shootings, including federal cooperation with state and local investigations, and ensure that federal agents are properly trained, appropriately supervised, and held fully accountable for their actions;

4. End the detention and deportation of U.S. citizens;

5. End the anonymity of federal agents by requiring them to remove their masks and provide identification;

6. Ensure robust minimum standards of care at detention facilities – including access to medical care, clean water, and edible food, and protections against abuse – and ensure independent investigations of deaths.

Congress must also:

1. Uphold our constitutionally mandated oversight authority over the Administration to deliver accountability and transparency, and

2. Take action to remove DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from her position.

This is all headed in the right direction but I will throw in more piece - the goal shouldn’t be to stop the detaining of US citizens. It should force ICE to follow the Trump’s words and prioritize deporting criminal migrants and stop the targeting of long-settled, tax-paying undocumented immigrants without criminal records, immigrants here legally, and, of course, US citizens.

Here’s some new polling from YouGov which shows how much support there is in America for not deporting long-settled immigrants (this has been true for 20 years). (Note that this question does not ask about deporting recently arrived legal migrants like asylum seekers and current TPS holders. The wording around recent arrivals is vague):

The reason this matters so much is that if ICE’s job is to focus on the criminal migrants here in the US, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, not millions (for remember immigrants to the US have much lower crime rates than native born), it does not need all that money allocated in the big ugly bill. The only reason ICE would need all that extra money is 1) if it is planning on spending the next 10+ years rounding up and deporting between 10m and 20m legal and undocumented immigrants here in the US today 2) turn ICE into a partisan government backed militia used to terrorize blue states/cities and his domestic opposition. For whatever we get in the deal in these next few weeks - and things are headed in a good direction right now - we need to be laying the predicate for rolling back all the unnecessary funding ICE received in the big ugly bill.

There has been a lot of polling this week and it’s now clear Trump-Vance-Miller have lost the argument about ICE, badly. Let’s me now share two polls that stood out this week.

First, sharing detailed findings from a new YouGov poll that has the most comprehensive look at ICE and its practices so far:

And

A new gold-standard Pew Research poll of over 8,000 adults has found tremendous erosion of Trump’s support and standing, even with Republicans, over the past year. Trump’s job approval in the first Pew poll of 2025 was 47%-51% (-4). Today it is 37%-61% (-24), a twenty point decline in just one year.

Look at this brutal data. Small minorities now strongly back his leadership and conduct in office. The rest are wavering or opposed:

And only 38% of GOP voters now believe their Members of Congress should continue defending the indefensible (Trump that his):

In the FiftyPlusOne polling average Trump has lost ground this week and is now for the first time this term at -18 in job approval. On September 30th, the last day before the shutdown last year, Trump was -12. He has lost six points net since then. It’s why the White House does not want another shutdown - for the last one weakened him, badly.

Returning to Pew note this clear sign from Democratic voters that they are expecting our leaders to fight Trump:

As a sign that Dems understand that the politics of ICE and immigration have changed, and we now can go on offense and stop playing defense, Maine Senate candidate Janet Mills released an anti-ICE ad yesterday:

I’ve run out of space, and time, this am, so if you want to support our candidates or push our agenda please head back to yesterday morning’s post.

Keep working hard everyone. We have momentum now and need to keep fighting! - Simon