The Senate Friday approved a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security minus provisions to halt President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration, while the House debated a short-term funding measure in its drive to continue to battle the White House on immigration.
With DHS’s budget set to expire at midnight, senators voted 68 to 31 to fund the department through September. As part of a plan devised Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., senators also voted on a bill to restrict Obama’s 2014 immigration executive action that would defer deportations for millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.
Requiring 60 votes to pass, the measure failed 57-42.
DHS funding has become a battle between congressional Republicans and the White House over immigration. The House last month passed a DHS funding bill with provisions to halt Obama’s immigration executive actions. But the House-passed bill got stuck in the Senate, blocked by a Democratic filibuster.
McConnell devised the two-vote plan separating DHS funding from the immigration issue as the Senate’s way to avoid a shutdown. Several House Republicans balked at McConnell’s strategy, calling it capitulation to the White House and Democrats who demanded a so-called "clean" DHS bill devoid of immigration riders.
To counter, House Speaker John Boehne, R-Ohio,r called for a vote on a three-week funding bill for DHS that would avert a shutdown and perhaps prompt the Senate into a conference committee with the House to resolve differences between the two bills.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was whipping her Democratic caucus against the 3-week bill. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., blasted the House bill and called a conference committee a non-starter.
"We will not go to conference on some jury-rigged situation they send back… for whatever reason," Reid said.
If Congress fails to approve DHS funding by midnight, some 30,000 employees would be furloughed from a department that includes the Border Patrol, Secret Service, Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bulk of DHS’s agencies would continue to operate through a shutdown with worker who wouldn’t receive paychecks until the congressional stalemate ended.
Senate Chaplain Barry Black captured the severity of the situation in his morning prayer that opened Friday’s session.
"Remind them that lawmakers can work miracles with cooperation, but accomplish little with legislative brinksmanship," Black, a Seventh-day Adventist and retired Navy rear admiral, prayed.