The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday will take up a bill to fund several sectors of the federal government as a partial shutdown enters its fourth day.
Many Democrats – including leaders – have vowed to withhold support from the package.
On Monday evening, the House Committee on Rules advanced the measure – which would fully fund five sectors of the government while extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Jan. 13 – in a party-line 8–4 vote following a more than four-hour committee hearing.
As Jopseph Lord and Nathan Worcester report for The Epoch Times, with Democratic leaders indicating that they won’t give their backing to the measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need to rely mostly on his narrow Republican majority to pass the measure.
In a full vote of the House, Johnson can spare only one defection in a party-line vote, though some Democrats are expected to back the measure.
However, some issues with the Senate proposal could lead Republicans to oppose the measure.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime budget hawk and a particular opponent of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which falls under DHS, voted against the previous funding measure due to its funding for CISA, and could oppose the stopgap measure as well.
Other Republicans have pushed leadership to attach the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the measure.
Leadership has resisted these demands, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says would make the bill dead on arrival in the upper chamber. The bill reported out of the Rules Committee didn’t include the SAVE Act.
Nevertheless, the passage of the legislation through the Rules Committee—which includes conservative skeptics of the bill such as Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—is a good sign for Republican leaders on the funding package’s prospects.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) downplayed the difficulties in comments to reporters on Monday.
“They all come down to the wire, and then we get our business done,” Scalise said.
The bill at issue would provide full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.
Democrats are demanding reforms to DHS and its subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies before they’ll support a full-year funding measure, though many House Democrats—including leadership—have expressed opposition to extending DHS funding at all before these reforms are addressed.
Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, voiced opposition to the measure at the hearing.
“I will not vote for business as usual while masked agents break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referencing ongoing disputes related to the executive branch’s use of self-issued administrative warrants, rather than court-issued judicial warrants, to enter homes.
However, one Democrat—House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—indicated at the hearing that she would break with her party to back the measure.
“I will support this package,” DeLauro said at the hearing, referencing the five full-year funding bills attached to the package that have Democratic support.
She said that without the funding extension for DHS, Democrats “won’t be able to bring the kinds of pressure” needed to add reforms to the full-year DHS funding package.
McGovern explained his opposition in response to a question from The Epoch Times outside the hearing room.
“Personally, [I] cannot bring myself to go for one more cent for ICE without some serious guardrails put in place, and I think the leverage we have is now more so than two weeks from now,” McGovern said.
Johnson has said he is “confident” that the partial shutdown will end with the Tuesday vote, despite indicating that House Democrats haven’t given their support to pass the Senate-passed measure.
“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson told NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
House Democratic leadership has not indicated support for the measure publicly, despite it having been backed by Schumer and other Senate Democrats.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s clear that the “Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”
“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”
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