The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown entered its 60th day on Wednesday, but House Republicans are standing in the way of reopening much of the agency.
Congress returned in full on Wednesday, but there is no sense of urgency to end the longest government shutdown in history. Instead, the House is mired in a fight over extending the federal government’s spying powers, which expire next week.
The House did not schedule a vote on the Senate DHS bill for this week after returning to Washington following the Easter recess.
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Though it’s an issue started by congressional Democrats in the dead of winter, Republicans have now been passed the buck to finish it and are eyeing a party-line maneuver to fund immigration enforcement — the main sticking point in the ongoing back-and-forth — for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term.
“Republicans have been forced to do this the hard way,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said.
Part of the problem on the DHS funding front is that House Republicans are frustrated that they are being forced to consider the Senate’s Homeland Security funding bill, which carves out Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The only deal that can pass with Democrats’ support is to remove funding for those agencies, while Republicans say they’re being cornered into defunding law enforcement.
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In the meantime, the solution is to produce a “skinny” budget reconciliation package that funds ICE and Border Patrol, cutting out Democrats from the process entirely.
“The intention is that we now have to come in behind that and pass a reconciliation bill that would enable those agencies to continue to be funded three years into the future,” Thune said.
He and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., are slated to meet Wednesday afternoon to get both chambers in alignment on the plan. For now, it’s unclear whether both chambers can mark up identical budget resolutions — the first step in the budget reconciliation process — prior to the House’s next scheduled recess at the end of April.
Several House Republicans were irate at Thune’s comments suggesting the second reconciliation package should be a narrow bill.
“Well — he isn’t the only voice in this, is he?” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who has advocated against funding the department in two separate legislative vehicles, wrote on social media Monday. “Isolating DHS was stupid. Isolating ICE/CBP is worse. We should move other priorities with ALL of DHS… we’re running out of time to deliver and to clean up these repeated swamp messes.”
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And the House won’t vote to fund the bulk of DHS until the party-line bill hits Trump’s desk.
Johnson, before his huddle with Thune, said his chamber would take up the Senate’s “skinny reconciliation” blueprint.
“We’re going to do our part and fund the most essential functions of the government, and then we’ll do the rest of Homeland Security,” Johnson said.
He said he expected the upper chamber would have its budget blueprint — which undergirds the entire reconciliation process — crafted and passed by “the middle to the end of next week.”
“We’re going to move it as expeditiously as possible,” Johnson said.
Senate Republicans huddled Tuesday behind closed doors to sell the plan to their members, which, in itself, could prove challenging because of the desire among some to pay for ICE and Border Patrol spending by cutting funding elsewhere — a position that runs counter to GOP leadership.
But many Republicans view the forthcoming reconciliation package in a different light than the previous “big, beautiful bill,” which was initially loaded with steep cuts and offsets to fund Trump’s tax cuts.
They see it as a version of the normal appropriations process and argue that, because of that, they don’t need to find other parts of the budget to trim to front-load funding for immigration operations for the next three years.
“Not on this one,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., an ardent fiscal hawk, said.
And as the responsibility for ending the shutdown has politically shifted to Republicans, Democrats aren’t wasting the chance to knife them.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “Republicans could fix this today.”
“Instead of reopening DHS and delivering for the American people, Republicans are dragging the Senate through a partisan circus just to avoid basic accountability for ICE and Border Patrol,” Schumer said.
