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Senate Republicans have officially ditched an effort to fund President Donald Trump’s ballroom at the White House.
The fate of Trump’s gilded dining hall is now in legal limbo with likely no help coming from Capitol Hill.
Money for the Secret Service and the “East Wing Modernization Project” was omitted from a new version of Republicans’ bill Republicans announced Wednesday to fund immigration enforcement operations at the Department of Homeland Security.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) suggested there’s not much appetite for bringing the ballroom funding back.
“It’s not in here,” Thune told HuffPost, referring to the new bill. “I suspect if there’s something that people want to see get done there, they’d probably go through the appropriations process.”
There’s little chance Trump is getting ballroom money through the appropriations process, which is the normal way Congress writes bills funding government agencies. Regular appropriations bills require 60 votes to clear the Senate, and Republicans control just 53 seats, meaning they’d need at least seven Democrats to go along with a wildly unpopular Trump vanity project. Not much chance of that.
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“Thanks to the outrage of the American people and hard-fought challenges by Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans finally gave up on funding Trump’s billionaire ballroom for now,” Sen. **** Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday.
The ballroom billion had previously been included in an immigration bill going through a special “budget reconciliation” process that only takes 50 votes. The Senate parliamentarian said the provision couldn’t stay in the bill under the special budget rules. Republicans started reworking the provision, but then gave up and left town in a furor over Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday the slush fund is dead, prompting Senate Republicans to breathe a sigh of relief and get back on their immigration bill ― with no provisions addressing the slush fund, which some Republicans wanted to do, and no ballroom.
A White House official said it’s old news that ballroom funding is out and suggested Republicans had no choice but to obey the parliamentarian, whom Trump has repeatedly demanded they fire.
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“The parliamentarian’s decision was reported weeks ago,” the official said. “This framing is false as it implies that Republicans removed it deliberately rather than under parliamentary pressure.”
Trump started the ballroom project last year with the surprise wholesale demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House. He didn’t ask Congress, which has appropriated money for past major upgrades, and he didn’t ask the commissions set up to preserve historic architecture in the nation’s Capitol.
In March, a federal judge has said construction can’t continue unless Congress approves it, such as by appropriating funds, which is likely why the ballroom money suddenly appeared in the previous immigration bill. The next hearing in the case is on Friday. In the meantime, Trump has fumed from the sidelines, accusing the judge of jeopardizing security for all of America.
“If anything happens, he will be held responsible for the Death and Destruction caused to our Country,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.
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