Sahil Kapur

Here's the situation.

The Senate and the House are both on recess now, not expected to return for the next two weeks.

So I would expect not until mid-April could we see a permanent long-term solution to this mess.

Republican leaders who control the House trashed that bill.

They said it was essentially forced down the throats of Republicans by Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and Democrats, forgetting for a moment that it's Republicans who actually control the chamber, and the bill passed unanimously.

Which was a 60-day stopgap funding for all of DHS, including ICE and CBP, which they knew would not pass the Senate because this has been the fight all along for more than a month now, that Democrats would not agree to fund ICE and CBP without some reforms to the way immigration operations are conducted.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, made clear that it was never going to get to the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate.

So long story short, the stalemate continues.

I put this down ultimately to two things.

First, a communications breakdown between

John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, and Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, these two men were clearly not on the same page when Thune decided to proceed with that DHS funding bill that the Senate ultimately passed.

Now, what the president seems inclined to do here is to use...

Funding from a separate pot of money that Republicans passed last year in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill that applies to DHS.

This money seems to be designed for ICE and CBP as part of the president's mass deportation program.

But the White House sees some flexibility in the way it can spend the money, and it has decided apparently to use it to pay TSA officers and agents.

This bill passed with 89 votes in the Senate, which is just extraordinary.

You don't see that very often, even on small things, let alone a major piece of legislation like this, which is about housing affordability.

So there's a lot in here that both parties found agreement on.

It includes a series of grants and pilot programs for housing construction.

So it's all about increasing the supply of housing, which is a major concern because housing prices have gone up for renters and for homebuyers.