Congress just passed the Secure America Act — a $70 billion reconciliation bill that funds ICE and Border Patrol through 2029. The House passed it 214-212, strictly along party lines. The Senate pushed it through on a simple majority using reconciliation, bypassing the 60-vote threshold entirely.
Let's set aside the immigration debate for a moment and talk about what just happened procedurally.
This is the second time in less than a year that Congress has used reconciliation to ram through major spending without a single bipartisan vote. That's not how this tool was meant to be used. Reconciliation was designed for budget adjustments, not for bypassing the normal legislative process whenever one party has a razor-thin majority.
Now, on substance: border security is important. Nobody serious disputes that. But $70 billion is real money at a time when the national debt just crossed 100% of GDP and the CBO is projecting $1.9 trillion deficits. Where is this money coming from? What are we cutting to pay for it? Nobody's answering those questions because nobody's asking them.
Republicans passed this bill without a single Democratic vote. Democrats opposed it without offering a credible alternative. Both sides got what they wanted — a campaign talking point — and the American people got a bigger tab.
This is exactly the kind of governing that makes people give up on the system. Not because the issue isn't important, but because the process is broken and nobody in Washington seems interested in fixing it.
A Common Sense approach: secure the border, absolutely. But do it through regular order with bipartisan input, fund it responsibly, and stop using reconciliation as a shortcut every time you don't want to compromise.