DHS budgetDHS shutdown averted as House passes “clean” funding bill

The House yesterday voted to fund the Department of Homeland Security to the end of the fiscal year, without conditioning the extension on defunding the implementation of Obama’s immigration executive order.

The “clean” funding bill passed on a 257-167 vote, with seventy-five Republicans joining all 182 Democrats to avert a shutdown.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), in a rare move for a speaker, left his chair and went to the House floor to cast a vote in favor of the funding extension.

The Washington Post reports that conservative GOP lawmakers originally planned to use the threat of a shutdown of the entire government as leverage to rescind two immigration-related executive orders – the 2014 executive order which deferred deportation of about five million undocumented migrants and allowed them to remain in the United States, seek work, and get on the path to legalizing their status; and the 2012 executive order which applied to Dreamers, that is, to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as underage children and who have no criminal records.

A December compromise on the “Cromnibus,” a large budget bill, lowered the stakes. That deal allowed the funding of most of the government for the entire fiscal year, but continued funding DHS for only sixty days, at the end of which, conservative GOP lawmakers said, any further funding extension would be conditioned on the defunding of the 2012 and 2014 executive orders.

The strategy failed.

After a tense month of negotiations, which, last Friday, included a temporary one-week extension of DHS funding, Boehner gave up. In a speech to the Republican caucus on Tuesday, just before Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress, Boehner presented members of the caucus with three options: another stopgap bill, taking up a “clean” bill which has already passed the Senate, and a Friday-into-Saturday shutdown of DHS.

Boehner told fellow Republicans that he did not want to run the risk of a DHS shutdown, which, he stressed, “wasn’t an option” with the current level of threats to national security.

“As you’ve heard me say a number of times, the House has done its job by passing legislation to fund DHS and block the president’s executive actions on immigration,” Boehner said. “Unfortunately, the fight was never won in the other chamber.”