Tuesday afternoon, the House finally passed legislation that will fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the balance of this fiscal year.
Backed by House Speaker John Boehner, the so-called “clean” DHS budget bill had stripped out of it the controversial amendments that would have defunded President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and other presidential executive orders related to immigration some of the more ultra-right wing members of the House wanted attached to the bill because they believe the executive orders are unconstitutional.
As the clock ticked down to midnight last Friday when DHS would ran out of money that’d earlier been appropriated through Feb. 27 via a continuing resolution (CR), the House agree to yet another CR proposed by the Senate that would continue funding DHS for one more week, hoping somehow, someway this week they could push their DHS spending bill with the executive action defunding provisions through the Senate.
The Senate went along with the one-week extension to fund DHS in an attempt to prevent the shutdown of DHS in an adamant show of defiance against the Fiscal Year 2015 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act (HR 240) passed by the House in December that contained the controversial amendments politicians on both sides of the aisle knew along would sabotage the House funding bill in the Senate, despite GOP control of the chamber.
Senate Democrats and some realistic and pragmatic senior Republicans had stated from the beginning that they would not vote for the bill if the amendments were attached. But they were anyway.
With homeland security in the balance, Boehner pulled together enough votes to pass a clean funding bill this afternoon. The legislation passed 257 to 167, with only 75 Republican votes and all Democrats voting in favor. Obama is expected to sign it, although the bill does include hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain the operation and expansion of illegal alien family detention facilities across the country.
Read the rest of this report first published March 3 here.
