John Boehner said he would not commit to bringing up a bill to strip critical funding from the Department of Homeland Security in the next Congress. Instead, the speaker of the House says there are “lots of options” for blocking President Obama’s executive order on immigration. At a Thursday press conference in the Capitol, Boehner did not guarantee the House would vote to block or cut off funding from DHS once Republicans had control of both houses of Congress in 2015.
“There are a lot of options on the table,” said Boehner in response to a question from THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals of what we could or couldn’t do. But I do know this. Come January, we’ll have a Republican House and a Republican Senate, and we’ll be in a stronger position to take actions.”
Boehner and House Republican leaders are pushing to pass a short-term funding package before the end of the current budget resolution next week. The package would allow Congress to revisit the funding for DHS, which is implementing the order, early next year. The Ohio Republican emphasized the current plan to address the immigration executive order in the next Congress gives the GOP the best chance for “keeping our leverage.” But, Boehner said, “we have limited options in how we can deal with this.”
The speaker’s remarks came on the day the House is expected to vote for a bill, sponsored by Florida Republican Ted Yoho, that would bar the administration from exempting certain categories of unlawful residents from deportation. Some conservatives have argued the bill can do little to roll back the executive order because it fails to target any funding. Homeland Security has already secured office space and is currently hiring full-time employees and contractors dedicated to processing cases falling under President Obama’s executive order.
The House will return for the final days of its lame-duck session next week to vote on the funding package before the December 11 deadline. Failing to pass the short-term spending bill will result in a government shutdown, but a small number of Republican House members have expressed their opposition to the plan and support cutting off funding from DHS during before next week’s deadline. To pass his bill, Boehner will likely need Democratic votes.
“I expect that we’ll have bipartisan support to pass the omnibus appropriations bill,” Boehner told reporters Thursday.
Update: The Yoho bill to “block” Obama’s executive order has passed the House, 219 to 197.
