http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/homeland-security-funding-congress-plan-115582.html?cmpid=sf
Senate passes clean DHS bill
House and Senate Republican leaders are racing to defuse a crisis of their own making by beating Friday’s funding deadline.
By SEUNG MIN KIM 2/27/15 9:23 AM EST Updated 2/27/15 11:46 AM EST
The Senate on Friday passed a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that runs through the end of September, free of provisions unraveling President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
But the 68-31 vote won’t end the DHS drama on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers race down to the wire to try and defuse a crisis mostly of their own making.
Separately, the House is trying on Friday to pass a three-week financing measure for DHS, narrowly averting the midnight deadline for funding the agency that Republicans had singled out in December as their vehicle for opposing Obama’s immigration actions. Lawmakers would punt that deadline to March 19.
That, in theory, would allow more time for the two chambers to hash out their differences on the longer-term DHS measure. But Senate Democrats have already dismissed the prospects of any conference committee — so in three weeks, Congress could be back where it stands now.
“We will not go to conference on some jury-rigged situation they send back dealing with something they don’t for whatever reason,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Friday morning. The underlying funding provisions for DHS are already the product of negotiations between the House and the Senate from last fall.
The Republican-controlled Senate is also taking up a separate bill by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would override the action Obama issued in November, which was aimed at halting deportations for more than 4 million immigrants and giving them work permits. That action has now been blocked by a federal judge in Texas, but the administration is appealing the decision.
Senate Republicans hope the standalone measure will put the Democrats who opposed executive action last fall — many of them in the middle of contested reelection bids — in a tough spot. But Democrats say they won’t debate the measure until Congress has passed a so-called clean funding bill for DHS through the end of the fiscal year.
Still, one moderate Senate Democrat who criticized the actions last fall — Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana — said he would support the Republican-led bill to roll back Obama’s actions.
“It provides Democrats who led constituents to believe there was executive overreach with a chance to show they were at least a little bit serious when they said that,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday. “Democrats won’t achieve that by filibustering Homeland Security, and Democrats won’t achieve it by holding hypocritical press conferences just hours after voting to block funding for DHS.”
House Democrats, meanwhile, were whipping against the stopgap DHS funding measure, which means House Republicans will have to rely mostly on themselves to provide the votes.
Once the House volleys the DHS stopgap bill to the Senate, it’s likely to clear that chamber swiftly, perhaps by unanimous consent. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat, said Friday morning that his party will back the stopgap funding extension.
“I don’t know if they can pass the three-week bill. We would much prefer they do a full funding bill,” Schumer said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “But we’re not going to shut the government down.”
