Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the end-of-year spending legislation “is likely” to include a measure addressing President Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are devising their own legislation to boost national security by improving the nation’s visa waiver program, said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The Senate has not taken up a House-passed bill that would all but halt the program by significantly boosting the screening requirements. The bill passed overwhelmingly and with 47 Democrats, raising the prospects that it has enough support to override a veto from President Obama.
McConnell suggested the measure, or some version of it, could end up in the 2016 fiscal spending legislation, known as the omnibus bill.
“I think the refugee issue is likely to be dealt with in some way in the omnibus,” McConnell, R-Ky., said. “There are a lot of moving parts.”
In the House, Republican leaders are planning a vote on additional legislation that would boost the security of the visa waiver program so that it screens more carefully for potential national security threats.
Reid did not disclose the details of the Senate Democrats’ effort to reform the visa waiver system. “They are going to come up with some legislation,” Reid said.
Democrats in the House and Senate have proposed new legislation this week to prevent people using the visa waiver program from buying guns while the United States. And the Obama administration has called on Congress to codify its proposed changes to boost the government’s security steps when it comes to analyzing people using the program.
Reid did not promise that all Democrats would oppose spending legislation that included language on refugees, but suggested he would oppose it.
Republicans, he said, are “more concerned about this handful of Syrian refugees than they are the more than 30,000 Americans who are killed by guns every year.”
