Zach Schermele

So there's support for those funding measures in these appropriations bills.

And that's really a rebuke of a lot of the cuts to spending that the Trump administration has proceeded with.

Yeah, this is another chapter really in the story of what happens when you have one party fully in power in Washington.

You know, the Democrats do not have a lot of political levers to pull in Washington these days when they're frustrated about a particular policy that the White House especially has.

moves forward with.

And we've seen that on various fronts.

But I think immigration, most notably, and as we learned over the course of the last federal government shutdown, Democrats have increasingly become willing to utilize this

particular lever, which, you know, you could argue is sort of their most powerful one in Washington right now, to try and force the Trump administration's hand and congressional Republicans to shift course with respect to some of these things.

So that's part of what congressional Republicans say is kind of the irony of this whole debate over the past week or so here.

You know, ICE received a lot of money in the president's one big, beautiful bill act that passed last year with $75 billion over the course of the next several years.

And so they have more money on hand than they have had.

And they are going to be able to rely on those funds to continue funding.

operations regardless of whether the government shuts down.

It's been interesting to watch which Democrats in the Senate that previously were a lot more wary of government shutdowns decide in the course of a couple of hours even on the day of Alex Preddy's killing when that video was circulating all across the internet showing Border Patrol agents taking his gun.

and then fatally shooting him.

These lawmakers decided very quickly and got in line with the rest of the Senate Democratic caucus that they were going to withhold their votes over this funding package.

I'm thinking in particular of Senator Angus King of Maine and Independent who caucuses with the Democrats who said, I don't like shutdowns, but ICE cannot continue to operate and border patrol cannot continue to operate.

In this way, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said something similar.

Both of them were yes votes on avoiding a government shutdown for much of the last crisis.

It's interesting, actually, to see Republicans responding to this incident with respect to Alex Paredes in a way that differs from the White House and from the highest levels of the executive branch.