Today is Friday the 13th. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for one thing, the massive Department of Homeland Security is set to shut down at midnight.
On the last day before funding runs out, there will be no eleventh-hour votes on the House or Senate floor, no lawmakers seeking to make deals and no hope of a last-minute reprieve for DHS’ 260,000 employees.
Instead, both the House and Senate left town Thursday afternoon, a reflection of how far off a DHS funding deal remains. Senators departed for pre-planned travel, including a big trip to the Munich Security Conference, and they aren’t scheduled to return for 10 days.
House members can travel too, but Speaker Mike Johnson canceled official CODELs, so members and aides have to pay out of their own pockets. We still expect some members will make it to Munich (and maybe the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics too.) Lawmakers in both chambers are on notice to come back to Washington if a deal is imminent.
President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats will keep exchanging offers in an attempt to strike a deal on ICE reforms during the break. The next step is for Democrats to send a new offer back to the White House, which sent over its own proposal to Capitol Hill on Wednesday night.
There are some signs of progress. Democratic leaders and the White House are keeping details of the negotiations under wraps, which tends to indicate a serious effort. Although Democrats have said repeatedly that the White House doesn’t want a deal.
The funding fight also hasn’t devolved into the sort of personal grudge match that broke out during last fall’s brutal 43-day, full shutdown. GOP congressional leaders are letting the White House and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer take the lead, generally staying out of the fray for now.
Even so, this battle over DHS funding could morph into another prolonged shutdown. Here’s why.
1) Schumer can’t give up much — if any — ground in the funding fight. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has taken an even tougher line.
The Democratic base was already pressuring party leaders to do everything they could to push back on the Trump administration over ICE’s activities nationwide. After federal agents shot and killed two people, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, that pressure increased exponentially. Democrats saw a moral and political need to take a stand on the DHS budget.
It’s telling that Senate Democrats have been incredibly united behind their ICE demands, more so than the fall fight over health-care. Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), joined Republicans to support a failed procedural vote on a DHS funding bill Thursday.
“Our caucus is passionate about this,” Schumer said at a post-vote news conference on Thursday. “If you sat in on our caucus meetings, you’d see how strongly people feel. And you know who are among the strongest? Some of the very people who didn’t vote with us last time.”
2) The White House believes it’s past the worst of its political problems over ICE.
Following Pretti’s killing on Jan. 24, the White House and congressional Republicans quickly agreed to negotiations with Democrats, something they never really entertained during the Obamacare shutdown. It was a sign of the deep political and personal concern within the GOP over the crisis in Minneapolis.
But the two-week CR for DHS added some time between the initial uproar over Pretti’s death and the current negotiations. During that period, congressional Republicans have grown more critical of Democrats’ position.
Plus, the Trump administration has used the time to make its own changes to ICE’s operations, including sending border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Homan announced this week that Minnesota operations will wind down — but not end entirely.
These changes won’t win over Democrats who’ve been clear that they need ICE reforms written into law because they don’t trust the administration. But Republicans say these steps show the Trump administration is operating in good faith.
3) There’s pressure on GOP leaders and the White House from immigration hardliners to reject Democratic proposals.
If there’s a deal, conservatives have their own priorities that they want in the mix, including targeting “sanctuary city” policies. They’re eager to turn the fight into a battle over immigration policy.
If conservatives win out on these sorts of demands, a deal could totally fall apart.
Also, here’s news. An attorney for Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), one of the six Democrats targeted by the Trump administration over the “illegal orders” video, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro demanding they confirm by the end of Friday that the investigation into her has ended.
The letter notes Slotkin — who said Thursday she’d heard prosecutors might try to indict the Democrats again today — would mount vindictive and selective prosecution defenses to any indictment. The Justice Department failed to secure indictments against the six Democrats earlier this week.
