Senate Republicans don’t have the votes to pass a House bill funding the Department of Homeland Security. They also can’t figure out what to do after it fails.
They’re paralyzed because they want to fund an agency crucial to national security, but they also want to block President Obama’s executive order legalizing 4.1 million illegal immigrants, which they say is unconstitutional.
The bill does both, but the GOP can’t pass it without support from Democrats.
Senate Democrats rubbed in the fact on Tuesday by writing to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. and telling him they are sticking with Obama on immigration. Democrats want to pass a bill that funds DHS after it runs out of money on Feb. 27 but they say they won’t if Republicans attach their measure undercutting the president’s executive order. Even Democrats uncomfortable with what Obama did signed the letter to McConnell.
Still, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters, “We’re going to fight for the House bill.”
Republicans will strategize Wednesday over the regular lunchtime meeting of their Steering Committee, chaired by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. The risk of an agency shutdown in four weeks and the slow pace of the Senate make it likely that McConnell will bring the bill directly to the floor for a vote, bypassing the committees, Cornyn said. The legislation would be open to amendments then.
GOP leaders think they can win over the handful of colleagues who oppose the House bill by amending the part that deals with the executive order, but that would still leave them six votes short of the 60 needed to override the Democrats’ filibuster.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, floated a “plan B” on Tuesday, saying he might sue Obama on the grounds that “executive amnesty” exceeds his constitutional authority. Senate Republicans say publicly that they want to give the House bill a chance before speculating on other ways of fighting presidential overreach. Privately, however, they admit that they have no alternatives yet.
“Let’s see if there’s bipartisan support for the idea the president may have overreached here,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said. “If there is no bipartisan support for that then it will be very problematic.”
When the House and Senate negotiated an omnibus spending bill in December — with Democrats running the upper chamber — the GOP insisted the DHS be left out and get only two months of funding more via a continuing resolution. They wanted leverage to fight the executive order in the new Congress with the Senate in their control.
The House quickly passed a DHS appropriations bill this month that includes strong border security language and rolls back “executive amnesty.” That left the Senate’s 54 Republicans trying to figure out what’s achievable in the face of Democratic intransigence.
Democrats say they will only vote for a “clean” bill, and in their letter to McConnell cited national security priorities in the wake of terrorist attacks in Australia, Canada and France, and “the proliferation of foreign fighters that return home radicalized.” Some Republicans were alarmed by events overseas and worry increasingly about a DHS shutdown.
“We have to protect the security of the country,” said Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “This is not legislation we should be playing games with.”
Some Republicans are willing to let DHS funding lapse because most of its employees are considered essential, meaning they would show up to work even if there was no funding deal. (Their pay would be deferred.) Republicans could then blame Democrats and Obama for the shutdown.
This would, however, flout GOP leaders’ vow that no agency would shut down during a Republican Congress. It would also do nothing to stop Obama’s immigration order because the relevant immigration services are funded with direct user fees that don’t require congressional authority to be spent.
House Republican leaders have discussed negotiating a compromise in conference committee after the Senate GOP passes whatever DHS bill they can. But it takes 60 Senate votes to approve a conference committee, and Democrats, unwilling to roll back Obama’s order, won’t support it.
Hence the Republican quandary. The immigration hawks don’t have a strategy other than saying no to any DHS bill that doesn’t overturn “executive amnesty.” Sen. Jeff Sessions, a leading opponent of immigration, won’t speculate about how Republicans should proceed if Democrats sustain their filibuster.
“We need to do what we can, and I don’t think we should be defeatist at all,” the Alabama Republican said. “We should challenge members on both sides of the aisle to do the right thing.”
