WTF Just Happened Today

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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1/ Biden and House Republicans reached a deal to fund the government, but Congress might not have time to pass the legislation before a partial shutdown this weekend. House rules require 72 hours between when legislation is made public and when members can vote, which means that the chamber can’t take it up until late Friday. The Senate, meanwhile, requires 30 hours of debate, unless all 100 senators give consent to move faster – any one senator can slow down consideration. Funding for several key agencies expires at midnight Friday. The six spending bills in package collectively fund about 70% of the federal government. (Washington Post / NPR / Politico / Associated Press / New York Times / NBC News / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal)

2/ The Supreme Court will allow Texas to immediately begin enforcing a controversial immigration law that gives state police the power to arrest people suspected of crossing the border illegally. The ruling doesn’t uphold the law, but allows it to go into effect while litigation continues in lower courts. A federal judge in Texas struck down the law in late February, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision without explanation, leading to an emergency request by the Biden administration, which argued that the Texas law is a clear violation of federal authority to set immigration policy. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned in a dissenting argument that the law “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement” and “upends the federal-state balance of power that has existed for over a century, in which the National government has had exclusive authority over entry and removal of noncitizens.” The law makes it a state crime to illegally cross the Texas-Mexico border, allows police to arrest migrants suspected of illegally crossing the border from Mexico, and imposes criminal penalties of up to six months in jail and up to 20 years in prison for subsequent offenses. S.B. 4 also empowers state judges to order deportations to Mexico without Mexico’s consent. (NBC News / CNN / Axios / Associated Press / Bloomberg / Washington Post /