Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, checha/Getty Images Plus, and Oleksandr Malai/Getty Images Plus.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge. Due to short staffing, the Surge has brought on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to help complete the newsletter. It’s a work in progress; they keep pulling their guns on the computer when they get spell-checked.
The big story of the week was long airport lines, which finally forced Congress to act to end the lengthy Department of Homeland Security shutdown. Which is not to say that they successfully acted to end it. We check on in ye olde Iran war, which is either almost over or en route to a ground invasion. The House may soon expel a member, and the dollar is about to go MAGA.
Let’s begin with a three-entry run on an exceedingly messy battle in Congress.
1.
Mike Johnson
Will this wretched DHS shutdown ever end?
Early Friday morning, the Senate passed a bill to fund all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol—which already have heaps of cash from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to draw from—by unanimous consent. Senators then all flew home, assured that the House would briskly pass their product and end the six-week DHS shutdown by the weekend.
But House Republicans are refusing to behave like good little boys and swallow the Senate bill. Speaker Mike Johnson called the Senate bill a “joke” on Friday, and said that the House would vote on a bill to fund all of DHS, including the immigration enforcement agencies, for 60 days. Then what? It’s unclear. Not only is the Senate out of town and uninterested in returning for the next couple of weeks, but this bill would not—at all—be able to get 60 votes in the Senate. Now, President Donald Trump may be able to issue a (likely illegal, but whatever) executive order declaring an emergency to pay TSA agents until a funding bill finally passes. At the going pace, though, that could be a million more years.
2.
Chuck Schumer
How airport lines forced the Senate’s hand.
Set aside the House’s meltdown for a moment. How was the Senate, at least, able to do its part? The chamber finally reached its resolution on funding DHS for two simple reasons. First, the pain of the shutdown was finally being felt by the public in the form of interminable airport lines, as unpaid TSA agents either quit or called in sick. Second, senators badly wanted to go home for their two-week Easter recess. There was much intra-Senate grousing and griping and bickering in the days preceding Friday morning’s vote. It is not worth recapping. The bottom line is that they had to do something in order to go home, and so they did.
Let’s take stock of this lengthy Senate battle. Democrats, following the Minnesota shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, demanded reforms to ICE and Border Patrol in exchange for their votes to fund DHS. After weeks of talks with the White House, that all fell apart, and Democrats ultimately secured no reforms to ICE and Border Patrol. Then again, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put up a long fight, kept his caucus together, and successfully kept Democrats from ever blessing the toxic immigration enforcement agencies—all while dragging Trump’s approval rating further down. As for Senate Republicans? We’re going to need more space for this …
3.
John Thune
FAFO.
Senate Republicans’ argument is that they successfully blocked Democrats from securing any immigration enforcement reforms. “That ship has sailed,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Friday. “They kissed that opportunity goodbye by failing to provide funding for those agencies.” Now, Senate Republican said, they would have an opportunity to fund ICE and Border Patrol as they see fit, without the need for Democratic votes, through a reconciliation bill that isn’t subject to the filibuster. “What’s coming next will supercharge deportations and it only requires a simple majority,” Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt posted Friday morning. “FAFO.”
The main downside for Republicans having to do a reconciliation bill, though, is that they would have to do a reconciliation bill. In order to get Trump’s support for the DHS funding bill, Thune promised that he’d pair immigration enforcement funding with provisions of the SAVE America Act through reconciliation. Doing that is almost impossible, given the strict rules of the budget reconciliation process. Good luck explaining that failure to Trump down the road. Beyond that, it would be hard to contain the scope of reconciliation, as every faction of the party is going to want something—Iran war funding, spending cuts, you name it—before the midterms arrive and the music stops.
4.
Donald Trump
Is the war over, or just beginning?
The Iran war is done, according to the president. “The war essentially ended a few days after we went in,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’ve won this war. This war has been won,” he said Tuesday. Iran is done, destroyed, obliterated and “begging for a deal.” No doubt about it: Much bombing has been done, many Iranian targets destroyed, many top Iranian officials killed (along with many civilians).
And yet, consider what other developments are taking place: Two units of thousands of Marines are already headed to the region, and now a couple thousand paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne are on the way. So at the same time the war is “essentially ended,” ground troops are being readied for some options—either to take Kharg Island or other vital posts in the Strait of Hormuz, or to seize Iran’s existing stocks of enriched uranium, or something else. We don’t know. Members of Congress, including a number of frustrated Republicans who don’t feel like they’re given any information, also don’t know. Schrödinger’s War has both ended and will be coming soon. We wouldn’t be surprised if Trump announces a ground invasion to assembled children at the White House Easter Egg Roll.
5.
Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick
A House expulsion may be on the horizon.
We witnessed a rarity in the House this week: A public “trial” before the usually hush-hush House Ethics Committee. After a yearslong investigation, Florida Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick sat before the committee for hours on Thursday as it considered 27 ethics violations against her. The core of the allegations—for which Cherfilus-McCormick is also under federal indictment—is that the congresswoman routed much of a $5 million FEMA overpayment her company received to her congressional campaign, including through the use of straw donors. This is frowned upon by the law. It was the first such public “trial” before the Ethics Committee since 2010, and on Friday morning, the committee announced it had found her guilty on 25 of the 27 counts.
The committee will next meet after the Easter recess to determine an appropriate sanction to recommend to the full House. But this may well be headed to an expulsion vote, unless Cherfilus-McCormick resigns first. Democratic leaders have so far dodged weighing in on the merits of the case by pointing to her right to due process. That due process is quite nearly over, though, and the findings don’t look good.
6.
Emily Gregory
A special election that has Florida Republicans spooked.
Democrats’ hot streak in special legislative elections continued this week when Democrat Emily Gregory flipped a Florida state House seat that a Republican had won by 19 percentage points in 2024. This result earned special attention as one of Gregory’s constituents will be none other than Donald Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago home is within the district. “I would love to have a conversation” with Trump, Gregory told the Associated Press. “He’s welcome to call me, as I am his new state representative.”
There’s more to this outcome than Resistance-pleasing symbolism, though. The result comes shortly before the Florida Legislature begins a special session to gerrymander its congressional maps in the ongoing mid-cycle redistricting wars. GOP leaders have been eyeing an ambitious plan to secure the GOP a fresh five seats. But given the poor environment and the GOP’s hasty collapse among Hispanic voters, there’s growing concern among Florida Republicans that such a maximal gerrymander could spread the party too thin in the midterms and put incumbent seats at risk. Maybe they’ll narrow their ambitions in the special session and squeeze out a modest two or three more seats. But what fun would that be?
7.
Brandon Beach
Bumped from the dollar.
Trump DOJ Refuses to Rule Out Second Amendment Right to Nuclear Weapons
There Was a Deal to Fund the TSA! Then Mike Johnson Got Involved.
Brandon Beach is the treasurer of the United States, a job that is cool in one respect, which is that your signature appears on America’s paper currency. He got the job not because he’s particularly knowledgeable about the minting process, but because as a state senator in Georgia, he worked hard on Trump’s behalf to overturn the 2020 election. In any event, the job is no longer cool for Treasurer Beach, because his signature will no longer appear on paper currency. He’s been bumped on the line in favor of Donald Trump, who will become the first sitting president to have his signature appear on the dollar. “The President’s mark on history as the architect of America’s Golden Age economic revival is undeniable,” Beach said in the official Treasury announcement. “Printing his signature on the American currency is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.” Really, when you think about it, it is divinely inspired by the Lord.
How did it take nearly 5.5 years of cumulative Trump president-ing for him to get his name on the currency? You know he’s been asking about that for some time. And sure, he’s getting his name on Semiquincentennial coins already. But is that the best that Beach can do? He can’t give George Washington the old heave-ho from the dollar bill and get Trump’s big, beautiful visage on there? All we’re saying, Beachy, is that Treasurer Laura Loomer could do it.