House GOP rejected a bill
By Valerie Yurk, Aris Folley and Aidan Quigley
CQ-Roll Call
(CQ-Roll Call) — House Republicans — caught by surprise by the Senate’s early-morning deal on Department of Homeland Security spending — signaled they wouldn’t be jammed by the other chamber on their way out the door to a two-week recess, instead proposing a roughly eight-week stopgap measure to buy more time for negotiations.
The Senate’s amended bill, which would fund all of the department except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and most of Customs and Border Protection, received a largely chilly reaction among House Republicans on Friday morning. The Senate passed it by voice vote hours earlier.
The Rules Committee is planning to convene later Friday to report a rule for consideration of the yet-to-be unveiled stopgap measure, expected to run through May 22. The House would then vote Saturday on the continuing resolution.
That effort would be unlikely to pass the Senate, as Democrats have vowed to oppose any additional immigration enforcement funding.
“The Senate did their job,” a leadership aide in that chamber said. “It’s time for the House to do theirs.”
But House Republicans argued the Senate plan was hatched without their buy-in.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn, criticized the Senate for passing the bill “at 3 a.m. in the morning, when Americans are sleeping, and the news is not necessarily focused on it.”
“This is what Americans get so upset about when we talk about politicians, this is literally what they are mad about,” Emmer said.
“We have differences with what the Senate did last night, very clear differences,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., added.
House GOP rejected a bill
The bill is facing pushback from members of the party’s right flank, who are upset that it does not include funding for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which combats human trafficking and child sexual exploitation and is involved in counterdrug and anti-terrorism investigations.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., said Friday that he wants funding for HSI and the Border Patrol to be added back to the bill, along with a provision requiring photo ID to vote in elections that’s contained in a stalled measure sitting in the Senate.
“What we’re suggesting is that — the only thing we’re going to support is adding that funding into the bill, adding voter ID, sending it back to the Senate, make them come back in and do their work,” Harris said.
Procedural hurdles
Even if Republican leaders did want to move forward with the Senate bill as is, they would run into a major procedural hurdle. A vote held under suspension of the rules, a streamlined process that requires a two-thirds majority, could not be held Friday under House rules.
House rules only allow suspension votes on Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, a change leadership made at the start of this Congress as a concession to conservatives upset about using the suspension procedure to pass spending bills they oppose with Democratic support.
But to adopt a rule for debate, GOP leaders would need support from Democrats if enough Republicans lodge a protest vote — and crossing the aisle on rule votes is unusual.
House Democrats came out in strong support of the Senate-passed bill, which is similar to a version the party has pushed for weeks.
The bill “should be brought to the floor immediately so we can pay TSA agents, so we can end the chaos at airports across the country and stop inconveniencing millions of Americans as we approach Holy Week, Passover, Palm Sunday and Easter,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said after Democrats held a conference to discuss the legislation on Friday morning.
Jeffries told reporters that Democrats did not discuss how to vote on a potential rule to set up a floor vote on the legislation. But he didn’t rule out Democratic support for a rule vote.
Houses GOP rejected a bill
“That did not come up in the caucus meeting,” Jeffries said when asked if Democrats would be willing to support a potential rule vote. But he added that the party is “willing to do whatever is necessary to pay TSA agents to end the chaos and to stop inconveniencing millions of Americans.”
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters after the meeting that he’d support a rule to put the bill on the path to passage if Republicans fall short on votes.
“Obviously, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but my inclination is to ensure that we move forward with this bill,” he said.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, is another member of his party who said he was open to backing the rule.
Democrats had been demanding changes to immigration enforcement policy be included in legislative text, which they did not get in this deal. These include having immigration agents take off their masks and obtain judicial warrants before searching private property.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said that the final product did not include any of the changes on the list that Democratic leaders were pursuing.
“Certainly not the first bullet point, which is the judicial warrant,” Jordan said. “That just wouldn’t work, it would basically stymie any repatriation efforts completely. So they didn’t get any of that.”
While Democrats have vowed to continue to push for those changes, Republicans are instead eyeing a partisan budget reconciliation bill to provide additional immigration enforcement funding.
“If it does pass, it underscores how important it is that we are going to have to do a second reconciliation,” Jordan said.
(Savannah Behrmann contributed to this report.)
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