WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives voted Friday night to avert a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, so they can come back and have the same fight in a week.
The vote was the result of a divide between Republicans in the House and Senate over whether to surrender now or hold out for one more week. The GOP had been hoping to use the DHS funding battle to block President Barack Obama’s latest executive actions on immigration. Senate Democrats successfully pushed Republican leaders to allow a full-year DHS bill without immigration riders. That legislation passed the Senate 68 to 31 earlier on Friday, after even the most hardline Republicans said the effort to kill Obama’s plans through the funding bill was futile.
But House Republicans weren’t ready to cave. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) brought a three-week continuing resolution to a vote Friday afternoon, only to be blocked when 52 Republicans joined the majority of Democrats in opposing it. House GOP leaders had to regroup, apparently reaching a deal with the more conservative members of their caucus to bring up a smaller stopgap measure that would keep operations running at DHS for just one more week.
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Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is up for re-election in 2016, said Republicans should have never tried to include immigration measures in the DHS bill in the first place.
“Hopefully we’re going to end the attaching bulls**t to essential items of government,” Kirk told reporters.
