The House just passed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for 60 days.
But the move by Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team — which doesn’t have the support of Democrats or the Senate — all but ensures the DHS shutdown will drag on for at least the foreseeable future.
The 60-day DHS stopgap passed the House via a 213-203 vote with three Democrats voting with all Republicans. Republicans used a procedural maneuver — “deem and pass” — to pass both the rule governing debate and the underlying bill at the same time.
Of course, the bill is going nowhere in the Senate. It would fall well short of 60 votes, even if the Senate were to return early from its two-week recess. The House is also scheduled to leave tonight for a two-week recess.
“This is dead on arrival at this point. Senate Democrats have made it clear. Senate Republicans have left town,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told us.
Jeffries said the shutdown would end “today if Republicans had the courage and the patriotism to actually bring a bipartisan, Senate-passed bill to the floor — which would pass the chamber with Democratic and Republican votes.”
Johnson defended his decision to ignore the Senate-passed bill but sidestepped questions about what was next in the House with a two-week recess looming.
“We have to fund these agencies of government and that’s what our CR is going to do,” Johnson said.
It’s been a stunning turn of events over the last 20 or so hours. The Senate unanimously passed a bill to fund most of DHS, except for parts of ICE and CBP, and then promptly left town. At first, it seemed like the House would quickly follow, putting an end to the 41-day partial shutdown and then begin a two-week recess.
But cue House Republicans, who bashed the Senate approach and pushed ahead with a bill that didn’t have broad support outside of the House GOP conference, all but ensuring the DHS shutdown will continue into April.
“We’re in very different places than the whole Senate right now, but we’ve been consistent from the very beginning,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said.
“We want to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security, and I think the more they find out about the bill they voted for last night, they probably are hoping we bail them out by sending over the CR that funds everything.”
Still, the CR vote “doesn’t solve the full problem because we’re going to have to come back to this in a few weeks,” Scalise said.
What’s next? Great question. The Senate and House are scheduled to be out until April 13 — that’s 17 days from now.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said earlier Friday that the House Republican plan was “dead on arrival.” Senate GOP leaders also signaled as much.
And it would take unanimous consent to upend the pro forma schedule that Senate Majority Leader John Thune locked in early Friday morning for the next two weeks.
At the very least, the DHS shutdown is poised to enter its third month barring a dramatic reversal by the House or the Senate returning early.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier Friday to pay TSA agents amid an “unprecedented emergency.” DHS expects those agents, who have gone weeks without pay, will resume getting paychecks as soon as Monday.
But that still leaves large swathes of DHS — which oversees everything from FEMA to the U.S. Coast Guard — unaddressed.
Johnson has maintained that he wants to fund all of DHS, rejecting the Senate bill, which has carveouts for parts of ICE and CBP.
“The reason that we can’t accept this ridiculousness, ok, is because we’re not going to risk not funding the agencies that keep the American public safe,” Johnson said.
Remember, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill provided $140 billion for ICE and CBP, so those agencies wouldn’t need to be addressed until later this year.
How we got here. We cannot overstate the divide between Republican leaders right now.
Johnson said Thune was “forced” to act by Schumer and Senate Democrats. But the Senate-passed bill — which Thune offered — cleared the chamber unanimously around 3 a.m.
At the time, the White House signaled that Trump was on board with the Senate approach. Any GOP senator could have objected to it on the floor. None did.
“The Democrats want to let illegals come into the country,” Trump later told reporters when asked about what’s happening in the House. “I understand John Thune. And I understand Mike Johnson. They want to be sure that people aren’t coming into our country like they have for the last four years.”
Of course, Democrats reject that and point out that Thune and all other Senate Republicans agreed to the Senate-passed bill. Jeffries said Johnson is effectively on an island here.
“This is just Mike Johnson and House Republicans tripling down on extremism that hasn’t gotten them anywhere,” Jeffries said. “They’ve lost elections for 15 consecutive months, including most recently at Mar-a-Lago. But apparently, they haven’t learned their lesson.”
