Josh Hawley’s monthslong battle with Senate Republican leadership bore fruit Thursday, as he secured Senate passage of a bill compensating victims of nuclear radiation exposure over their objections.

Hawley (R-Mo.) said he directly confronted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last Thursday with “my deep frustration — to put it mildly” over his removal of the provision reauthorizing the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act from the annual defense policy bill.

“Tens of thousands of Americans are now worried about their coverage and their health care now because of what McConnell did,” Hawley, a vocal McConnell critic, said.

Asked to summarize his party’s leadership position on the legislation, which the Missouri Republican led with Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Hawley deadpanned: “Not helpful.”

The bill ultimately passed the Senate 69-30. A unique coalition of Senate Republicans supported the measures: Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), John Boozman (Ark.), Mike Braun (Ind.), Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Steve Daines (Mont.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Bill Hagerty (Tenn.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Jim Risch (Idaho), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), Dan Sullivan (Alaska), J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Hawley.

Daines, chair of the NRSC, was the lone member of GOP leadership to back the bill. Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Tom Carper (Del.) were the lone Democrats to oppose the measure.

Part of the concern among many Republicans is the bill’s price tag. An amendment to the NDAA last year was scored by the Congressional Budget Office to add to the deficit by $153 billion, though a Hawley aide said their revised proposal will “cut about $100 billion off” that estimate. A new CBO score has not been released.

“If we have $60 billion for Ukraine, which many of [my GOP colleagues] just voted for, surely we have enough money to help these people,” Hawley said, flanked by victims of radiation and advocates. “If we’ve got money for 6,000 earmarks, which apparently we do, surely we have money to help people who the government has poisoned.”

Republican leadership still wasn’t ready to sign onto the proposal.

“Sen. Hawley and I have been texting back and forth and had a couple of discussions — and we’re not quite exactly where we need to be yet,” Sen. John Barraso (Wyo.), the current Senate GOP conference chair, told POLITICO.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), another member of leadership, called the original Hawley proposal “way, way too expensive and expanded” but dismissed the idea of top Senate GOP members being steadfastly opposed to the proposal as “a little fantasy to me.”

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) called Hawley’s efforts “helpful” toward shaping the bill in a way to “refine it and narrow it in a way that reduces the score,” but did not commit to passing it. McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Missouri Republican, up for reelection this year, sees the program as justice for those exposed to radiation and worthy of the cost.

“This is a moral issue: The government has exposed these good Americans to nuclear radiation without their consent, usually, without any support, definitely,” he said. “Now the government needs to make it right.”

Hawley estimates the reauthorization would extend to up to 600,000 new claimants and expand the program to make eligible people exposed in Missouri, Idaho, Montana, Guam, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska. Absent congressional action, the program would expire on June 7.

As for what comes next in the House, Hawley said he’s had “multiple conversations with the speaker personally, one-on-one” about the urgency of taking up the bill and would continue to press the issue. Speaker Mike Johnson’s office did not comment on whether the House would take up the measure.

If it can secure a vote in the House, the measure would likely become law. The White House said in a statement of administration policy on Wednesday that it “supports” the legislation.

Hours before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, the House passed legislation that would require the detention of undocumented migrants charged with theft or burglary.

The Laken Riley Act, named after a Georgia nursing student allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant, passed 251-170 with 37 Democrats in support.

The measure would also empower state attorneys general to sue the federal government if they can show their states are being harmed through failure to enforce national immigration policies. And it comes as recent polling shows Americans see immigration as the most important issue facing the U.S.

“Republicans will not stand for the release of dangerous criminals into our communities,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on “Fox News” on Wednesday.

The measure’s sponsor, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), invited Riley’s parents to the State of the Union but “they have chosen to stay home as they grieve the loss of their daughter,” he posted Wednesday.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said the measure had improved since its inception, but that it faced a certain death in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“[It’s] still not great,” Roy said, arguing the bill remains too weak. “But, you know, we can try to move something — it’ll die in the Senate.”

Leading Democrats continued to criticize the effort. “This is just a totally cynical and disgusting attempt to exploit this tragedy to score cheap political points in an election year,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), ranking member of the Rules Committee.

“House Republicans have turned this tragedy into a partisan attack on immigrant communities. This is a time to bring the community together, not tear them apart. These partisan policies fuel anti-immigrant hate, increase fear in immigrant communities, and make it more difficult for law enforcement to form the relationships necessary to prevent crime in our communities,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

The House-passed, six-bill government funding package is now in the hands of the Senate, where there’s a time crunch to get it passed before Friday night’s shutdown deadline.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer got the procedural ball rolling Wednesday night. But the Senate’s well-known timing games are expected to play out before final votes to send the six bills to the president.

“We’re working to get this done as quickly as we can,” Schumer said Wednesday.

To fast-track action on the $459 billion measure before the weekend, all 100 senators would have to agree to speed up consideration and vote. Republicans are likely to demand amendment votes in exchange for that fast-track process. (Though those proposals, which aren’t public yet, are unlikely to succeed.)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a frequent naysayer to time agreements, said Wednesday he hasn’t yet decided if he’ll be calling for additional votes before final passage.

Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.

The House approved a six-bill government funding package on Wednesday, sending the bill to the Senate with little time to spare before yet another government shutdown deadline.

The upper chamber must now lock down an agreement to speed up votes on the $459 billion measure before the weekend, which requires consent from all 100 senators. Republicans will likely demand a number of amendment votes in exchange, though none are expected to succeed.

Facing heat from his right flank, Speaker Mike Johnson relied on robust support from Democrats to pass the package in a 339-85 vote. He managed to still secure backing from a majority of the House GOP, a muted win for the speaker as conservatives grumble about his tendency to heavily lean on Democrats to pass major legislation. Ultimately, 132 Republicans supported the measure, while 207 Democrats voted in favor of the bill.

Congress is now halfway to sending a half-dozen annual spending bills to President Joe Biden’s desk, with a Saturday shutdown deadline looming. It’s the first real legislative progress lawmakers have made toward funding the government for the fiscal year that began more than five months ago, during an appropriations cycle primarily delayed by House Republican infighting.

And another deadline is fast approaching. Congressional leaders have until March 22 to clear another six spending bills that present an indisputably bigger challenge, comprising about 70 percent of the federal discretionary budget, including the Pentagon and health, labor and education programs.

The six-bill bundle passed Wednesday would fund more than a dozen federal departments and independent agencies that handle transportation, energy, housing, agriculture and veterans programs. Congressional leaders unveiled the measure on Sunday after weeks of negotiating and sparring over policy provisions, with Johnson under enormous pressure to deliver GOP wins.

In a floor speech, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pledged to start moving the package in the upper chamber immediately.

“It took a lot of bipartisan cooperation to reach this agreement on these six appropriations bills,” he said. “Now it will take more bipartisan cooperation to finish them.”

During a press conference Wednesday to rail on earmarks included in the bills, Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Mike Braun of Indiana said they’ll be pushing for some amendment votes once the funding package reaches the Senate.

“The only way you get an amendment vote is to be a pain in the butt,” Scott said.

Frequent contrarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that he hadn’t decided whether he will demand amendment votes to the funding package.

With little extra non-defense funding to work with for the current fiscal year, the measure keeps spending levels mostly stagnant at agencies like the Agriculture Department and the FDA. The bills funding the departments of Transportation and Energy would see small budget increases, while agencies like the Interior Department, the EPA, the Justice Department and the National Science Foundation are set to see some cuts.

The White House urged “swift passage” of the bill in a statement on Tuesday, noting that it “represents a compromise and neither side got everything it wanted, but it would prevent a damaging shutdown of several key agencies, protect key priorities and make progress for the American people.”

Democrats are lauding a $1 billion boost for a nutrition assistance program for moms and babies, known as WIC, defeating a Republican push to only provide that funding if they got a pilot program aimed at restricting SNAP food aid purchases.

And Republicans are championing a policy provision that would preserve gun rights for military veterans who are unable to manage their VA benefits or finances. However, the Senate had already adopted those protections as an amendment last fall with support from Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Angus King (I-Maine).

There is some last-minute drama over that rider and other provisions in the bill, though none are expected to imperil passage. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a senior appropriator who oversees the complicated Homeland Security spending bill, is already vowing to oppose the funding package over the VA gun policy provision, arguing that he can’t support the rider “with this many lives in the balance.”

Democrats have worried the provision could potentially contribute to more gun violence, deaths and veteran suicides. Murphy said he unsuccessfully fought to have it stripped out, arguing this concerns “very, very mentally ill veterans.”

And Pennsylvania’s two Democratic senators on Wednesday pulled support for a $1 million earmark for a LGBTQ+ community center in Philadelphia, amid a broader partisan standoff over steering federal cash to programs for LGBTQ+ people.

The Senate’s top tax writers clashed Wednesday over who knows what when it comes to a pending tax agreement now teetering in the chamber.

The contretemps began when Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) groused to reporters that Republicans’ demands for changes to the package remain hazy, even at this late date, calling them an “amorphous smorgasbord” of proposals.

“We don’t have a list of what amendments they would like” and “we still don’t have a description of the process they would like,” Wyden said.

Moments later, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) walked by.

Told of Wyden’s complaints, he said: “They know exactly what I want.”

“They know the issues — they know them very well. There’s nothing amorphous about it.”

Responded Wyden: “If there is somewhere where there is a piece of paper with specifics, I’m very interested in seeing it.”

The back-and-forth suggests an agreement to end what’s become a protracted dispute over the legislation — which passed the House with overwhelming support in January — is not imminent. It would expand the child tax credit as well as a trio of business tax breaks, among other changes.

Democrats had once hoped to get the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk before the beginning of the tax season. Now, Wyden say he hopes they can move it by the end of filing season in April.

Crapo has publicly identified some of the changes his side wants, including dropping language that would allow people claiming the child credit to use previous year’s income to calculate the benefit.

He also said he wants to address a glitch dealing with “catch-up” retirement contributions and consider some traditional tax extenders. Many Democrats see the plan as a finished product and are reluctant to reopen negotiations, fearing new rounds of bartering could sink the package.

Many observers are now watching to see if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will try to force the issue by attempting to bring the plan to the chamber floor. Wyden said he’s been discussing that with Schumer but declined to discuss specifics.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, the lead author of new bipartisan legislation directed at TikTok, said that the bill isn’t intended to ban the popular app, but to disconnect it from China’s influence by forcing Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell it — and is written to clear legal hurdles that have stalled previous efforts.

“This is not a ban. Think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process,” Gallagher (R-Wis.) said at a press conference Wednesday discussing the bill, which gained momentum Tuesday night with backing from the White House.

Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) — the chair and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party — introduced the measure on Tuesday. It would force the divestiture of TikTok over claims its owner, ByteDance, has ties with the Chinese Communist Party. If the sale doesn’t happen within about six months, the bill calls for the app to be blocked on U.S. app stores and websites.

Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, disputed Gallagher’s claims the bill wasn’t a TikTok ban bill. “They can try to dress it up however they want, but this is a bill to ban Tiktok and give unprecedented power to take apps off your phone,” he told POLITICO. He also said ByteDance has no ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

White House backing: The legislation got the endorsement of the Biden administration Tuesday night, with a statement from the NSC spokesperson saying it was “an important and welcome step” to address the risks that ByteDance’s ownership poses to Americans’ sensitive data and national security.

Gallagher told reporters he thinks the bill has a path forward and that he has been working with the administration for six months to ensure the legislation holds up constitutionally. He also said the bill is his top priority during his last few months before retiring from Congress.

He said he’s learned from past mistakes in failed legislation last year that sought to ban TikTok outright, as well as the effort by former President Donald Trump to ban the app, which was blocked by a judge for exceeding his legal authority.

Avoiding ‘legal buzzsaw’: The legislation gives the president authority — after notifying Congress — to require divestment of an app if it is determined to be controlled by a foreign adversary, or face a ban on U.S.-based app stores or web hosting sites.

The bill claims ByteDance fits this criteria. It only applies to apps controlled by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, according to a Select Committee aide.

“It’s an executive/legislative collaboration that draws upon not only previous failed efforts legislatively, but also the experience of the Trump executive order, which did run into a legal buzzsaw,” Gallagher said.

One hurdle to app bans is the 1988 Berman Amendment, which prohibits the president from banning “informational materials” internationally. Gallagher said he didn’t expect the Berman Amendment to be an issue for his bill. “We had outside legal analysis of that and we had executive branch analysis of that,” he said, “and I think we’re beyond that concern.”

TBD on Senate: Gallagher told reporters he’s gotten “a lot of outreach from senators” after they introduced the bill.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll have a really good core group of support from the Senate,” he said.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the lead Senate author of the RESTRICT Act, which would give the administration more authority to block apps owned by a foreign adversary, in part by amending the Berman Amendment, said in a statement that he’s still reviewing the bill.

Warner said he still has concerns about the constitutionality of an approach that names specific companies, like ByteDance.

Gallagher said the bill has undergone constitutional legal scrutiny and doesn’t violate the Constitution’s ban on “bills of attainder” that punish a specific individual person or group of people.

Lawmakers have stripped a $1 million earmark for a LGBTQ+ community center in Philadelphia from the funding package Congress is expected to clear this week.

Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) office, in a letter to appropriators, requested the funding be cut from the bill. But he said Wednesday that his staff had made the decision to pull the funding without his input, and implied that a conservative social media account, which accused the center of hosting sex parties, had played a part in the decision.

“I wasn’t part of that decision. It wasn’t my personal decision to do that,” he said in an interview. “I never realized that the Libs of TikTok should determine our priorities and what we’re going to support,” referencing a notorious conservative account.

Libs of TikTok posted March 5 that the funding would help a center that promoted a forthcoming event for those interested in “BDSM, kink and fetish” and singled out Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Fetterman for supporting the funds.

Fetterman later added in a statement that his staff felt the choice was either to “pull it or watch it get stripped out, attacked by Republicans, and ultimately killed.” He added that he would continue to push for the funds in next year’s funding measures.

The last-minute nixing is the latest in a blistering eight-month feud over steering federal cash to programs that serve LGBTQ+ people. It started last summer when Democrats accused House Republicans of behaving like “terrorists” as they worked to strip millions of dollars lawmakers had already secured for projects in their districts.

Casey said in a brief interview Wednesday that “new information” obtained Tuesday caused him to yank his support.

“We made a decision upon receiving new information yesterday — and only yesterday — to not support the appropriation,” he told POLITICO, without elaborating on that new information. “We have new information that caused me to decide to pull support for the earmark.”

The funding for the William Way LGBTQ Community Center was included in the final earmark list top lawmakers released Sunday in rolling out the six-bill spending package the House is set to pass Wednesday afternoon. But that $1 million to renovate and expand the center is missing from the official list submitted for the Congressional Record.

The office of Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), a leading proponent of the funding, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

House Republicans were also successful in blocking other LGBTQ+ earmarks from the final funding bills, including a $970,000 project Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) initially got approved last summer for an LGBTQ+ housing program in her southeastern Pennsylvania district. GOP lawmakers also stripped out $850,000 for affordable housing units for LGBTQ+ seniors in Boston that Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) initially got approved.

Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.