By

Ed Kilgore,

political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015

Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks to reporters on May 21.

This was supposed to be the week when first the Senate and then the House whipped through a budget-reconciliation bill on party-line votes. Its original purpose was pretty simple: to pre-fund immigration-enforcement activities beyond the end of Donald Trump’s second term without addressing any of the restraints on ICE or Border Patrol that Democrats have been demanding for months.