As senators headed Wednesday into their latest “vote-a-rama,” one thing was clear: Not many of them were happy.

The procedural hallmark involves a series of unlimited amendment votes and is often bemoaned because of its marathon pace, twilight-hour votes and embarrassingly large pizza deliveries to the U.S. Capitol. But Republicans’ move to rely on a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill to fund federal agencies outside of the regular appropriations process has added a sour note — and warnings of a slippery slope.

Connecticut Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said, “Clearly Democrats are going to use this to our benefit” in the future. 

“It’s a lot easier to walk away from bipartisan budget negotiations if you are willing to use reconciliation to pass regular appropriations. So I don’t see why Democrats wouldn’t do the same thing,” he said.

While annual appropriations bills require 60 votes to pass in the Senate — typically requiring bipartisan support — a reconciliation bill can be passed with a simple majority, effectively steamrolling past any opposition from the minority party.

“The 60 votes matters a lot less for budgets now that reconciliation is normalized for ongoing appropriations,” Murphy said.

Republicans want to use the process to secure enough funding for immigration enforcement agencies under the Department of Homeland Security to last through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term. 

Democrats, however, oppose funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol without new guardrails on federal immigration agents. The standoff has resulted in a record-breaking nearly 10-week-long shutdown of DHS.

Using budget reconciliation as a workaround could change how Congress does its job, members on both sides of the aisle acknowledged.

“They’re setting a precedent for the future, and it is going to be extremely difficult in the future for whoever ends up in the minority,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., ranking member of the Appropriations Committee. 

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said the “bottom line is that they tied themselves in a total knot.”

“They can’t get things done in regular order, and now they’ve given us this ability [and] opportunity to show the contrast between them and us,” Schumer said. “We believe in the appropriations process. We want to see it go forward. They’re helping destroy it.”

Democrats ‘caused it,’ says GOP

Republicans say they had little choice but to invoke the procedure. 

“That’s ridiculous,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., a member of the Appropriations Committee, said of Democrats’ critiques. “Then maybe [Schumer] shouldn’t be shutting down the government. And then to come out and say that?”

Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee and led earlier negotiations aimed at ending the shutdown, said she “agreed” with Democrats that it is creating a dangerous precedent. But she said Schumer “caused it.”

Senators reached a bipartisan agreement in March on a bill to fund all of DHS except for the immigration agencies, but House Republicans rejected it. After that, using reconciliation became the most plausible path forward. 

Molly Reynolds, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said lawmakers have long used reconciliation to pay for discretionary programs.

During the 2025 debate over the so-called “big beautiful bill,” for example, Republicans used the process to increase immigration and border enforcement funding — part of a package that also included tax cuts and other provisions.

During the 2021 debate over the bill nicknamed the “American Rescue Plan,” then-President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats pushed through a reconciliation bill that included, among other things, COVID-19 relief money that would ordinarily go through the appropriations process.

The difference, she said, is that this time the discretionary programs are the entire purpose of the bill — not part of it.

“I would describe what they’re doing as the next step in what’s been an evolution, but one that does feel different,” she said. 

She, too, worries about the precedent: “We’re slipping further down the slope with this.” 

She said the use of reconciliation also reveals “how much of our previous status quo was sustained by the norms and not the rules, and particularly by the appropriators being really jealous guardians of their power.” 

“Historically if you had tried to say to the chair of the Appropriations committees of the House and Senate, ‘Hey, take this appropriation that you have and give it to the authorizers because that’s the only way we can get it done,’ they would have told you to go pound sand,” she said.

A debate of ‘contrast’ 

Even as they rejected the premise behind the vote-a-rama, Schumer said earlier Wednesday that Democrats would make the most of it, teasing their plans to introduce “lots of amendments.”

“All the focus of those amendments is to show the contrast” with Republicans and the issues associated with rising costs in the country, Schumer said. “They are funding a rogue police force that is not even popular with the American people, and we’re going to keep at it and keep at it and keep at it.”

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said Democrats wanted to focus on “what’s not in this bill.”

“When you’re in the majority in the Senate, you get limited opportunities to use this unusual tool of reconciliation once, maybe twice in a year. It’s pretty significant that in using this tool, they have decided to do exactly nothing about the cost of living [and] to forward fund the most unpopular federal agency in the government for three years,” said Schatz, an appropriator. “Regular people can’t afford their lives anymore.”

GOP leadership in the Senate has stressed the need to prioritize a narrow package focused on immigration enforcement funding and not on other political priorities. 

But some Republicans were planning amendments to try to get their counterparts on the record with politically difficult votes. For example, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Wednesday announced he “filed an amendment to BAN federal funding for Planned Parenthood this morning.” 

The chamber’s newest member, Sen. Alan Armstrong, said he wasn’t looking forward to any overnight theatrics. Appointed about a month ago to replace DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Armstrong, a businessman, hasn’t yet participated in the Senate’s infamous tradition.

“From a business perspective, it seems like a lot of time wasted by a lot of capable people that have important things to be doing. But it seems like the procedure is the way that things work around here,” the Oklahoma Republican said Wednesday.

Despite the disdain for the vote-a-rama process, Reynolds said there is some value to it. She compares it to letting out the pressure in a tea kettle. 

“Despite how much everyone complains about it, it serves a purpose in the contemporary Senate, where the agenda is so tight folks don’t even get symbolic votes on the things they want to see votes on.”

Jessica Wehrman contributed to this report.