For the third time in a week, the new Republican Senate majority brought a bill to the floor that would fund the Department of Homeland Security while stopping President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
Senate Democrats blocked the $40 billion House-passed measure all three times, and further attempts are likely doomed to fail.
Despite the stalemate in the Senate, House Republicans are in no hurry to bring the DHS spending battle back to their side of the Capitol, where they also control the gavel.
After four years of governing the House in a divided Congress, House GOP lawmakers and aides say they are happy to sit back and leave the tough negotiating to the newly empowered Senate Republicans.
“It’s not the House’s problem now,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C. “The House has done what it’s supposed to do. We’ve passed a bill to fund DHS. The Senate has to do something.”
The DHS spending measure is set to become the first major test of unity for Senate Republicans, who won back the gavel in November after remaining mostly sidelined in the minority since 2007.
To get legislation past a 60-vote threshold, the Senate GOP will likely have to strip out all or part of the language curbing the president’s immigration directives. Such a plan is the only path to picking up some Democratic support.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is drafting a plan to fund DHS and block only Obama’s most recent immigration executive action, which allows more than 5 million illegal immigrants to obtain work permits and some federal benefits. The Collins proposal would leave intact an earlier Obama directive allowing work permits and benefits for hundreds of thousands of people who arrived here illegally as children.
But Democrats are holding fast in their opposition to anything but a “clean” spending bill that excludes any language blocking Obama’s executive action.
If Senate Republicans try to pass such a bill, it will likely set off an internal fight with conservatives that the Senate GOP has largely been able to avoid for the past eight years because they didn’t control the gavel.
Senate Republican lawmakers have in recent years been eager to leave the infighting on divisive legislation up to the House majority, which battled repeatedly and often exhaustively to come to consensus on spending and immigration bills since the party won the majority in 2010.
Now that Republicans control the gavel in the Senate, it’s time for the GOP in the upper chamber to take on the fight, House Republicans said.
“The House did its work,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters.
In fact, Boehner has not reached across the Capitol to offer advice to newly minted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about how to move forward with the bill.
“We won this fight,” Boehner said, referring to the House passage of the bill. “Now it’s time for Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats to come together and to hold the president accountable.”
House Republicans, aides said, are staying as far away from the Senate debate as possible for now. Republican leadership offices in the House and Senate aren’t even plotting a “plan B” together at this point, even though a temporary measure funding DHS runs out in about three weeks.
“The ballgame is over there,” another GOP leadership aide told the Examiner. “It definitely relieves a little bit of pressure.”
