By Richard Cowan and Nolan D. McCaskill
WASHINGTON, April 1 (Reuters) – Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday said they will take a two-pronged approach to ending the legislative deadlock over Department of Homeland Security funding by passing a bill soon to end the partial agency shutdown and attempting to follow up with another bill providing money for the remainder of the Trump administration.
Congress “will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said in a joint statement.
Congress is in the midst of a two-week recess.
But the next legislative action is expected to come early on Thursday, when the Republican-controlled Senate is scheduled to hold a “pro forma” session that usually operates for a very short period of time and with few senators in the chamber.
The goal, according to a source with knowledge of the plan, is to again approve a DHS funding bill that the Senate unanimously passed last week, but the Republican-controlled House rejected. That bill would fund DHS to September 30, the end of this fiscal year.
Instead of signing off on the bipartisan Senate bill, the House passed a 60-day extension of DHS funding – a measure that Democrats had repeatedly rejected.
Those dueling bills underscored the deep divisions among conservatives in both chambers, in addition to significant disagreements between Republicans and Democrats.
BLAME GAME
The longer-term funding could take weeks, if not months, to compose and likely would be through a process that excludes Democrats. It is too early to know whether the bill Republicans eventually draft will clear strict procedural hurdles.
Even with this latest development, Republicans and Democrats were still blaming each other for the six weeks in which some DHS workers received no paychecks and airports were mobbed with passengers struggling to get through long security lines. That was because some Transportation Security Administration agents either called in sick or quit their jobs.
“For days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
The standoff in Congress began when Democrats insisted on new controls governing a controversial migrant deportation program. Democrats wanted the spending legislation to prohibit immigration agents from concealing their identities and entering homes without a judicial warrant, among other restrictions.
President Donald Trump, who did not take a clear public stance on last week’s congressional battle, said on Wednesday that he was working with Johnson and Thune to fund immigration agents through a process that bypasses the Senate filibuster.
“We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“I am asking that the Bill be on my desk NO LATER than June 1st,” he said.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Nolan D. McCaskill in Washington and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Editing by Daphne Psaledakis and Rosalba O’Brien)
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