Homeland Security, Immigration News: U.S. Senate Blocks Funding Talks with House; Another Friday Deadline Looms

The U.S. Senate on Monday voted to block negotiations with the House of Representatives on funding the Department of Homeland Security, leaving few options for House Speaker John Boehner as another midnight Friday deadline loomed.

The political drama heightened three days after lawmakers narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the D.H.S., the U.S. domestic security super agency, in a dispute over immigration reforms.

The U.S. Senate voted 58-31 to send a "clean" full-year funding bill back to the House on Monday.

The votes leave few options for conservatives in the Republican-dominated House to use the D.H.S. budget to press its fight against President Obama's orders on immigration in which he bypassed Congress.

"Speaker Boehner has the power to end this standoff with a snap of his fingers ... Put the 'clean' bill up for a vote" in the House, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer told reporters Monday.

Boehner is facing criticism over his management of an embarrassing drama on the House floor on Friday night. In a rebuke to Boehner, the House rejected his proposed three-week funding extension. Then, hours later, a one-week stopgap bill was approved when Democrats agreed to support it.

"The fact that the President had to sign a seven-day extension does reflect an abject failure of the leadership in the House," said White House Spokesman Josh Earnest. "But they have an opportunity to address that shortcoming by allowing this full-year funding bill to go to the floor this week."

The conflict over the D.H.S. – the agency that coordinates domestic anti-terrorism efforts and secures U.S. borders and airports – stems from conservative Republicans' demands to use the security agency's budget to ban spending on Obama's 2012 and 2014 orders lifting the threat of deportation against millions of undocumented immigrants.

A cut-off in funding would have forced the D.H.S. to dismiss about 30,000 employees, or about 15 percent of its workforce, but about 200,000 others would have stayed on the job without pay, including airport and border security agents.

Democratic Leader Sen. Nancy Pelosi last week called on Boehner to support a clean, long-term bill to fund D.H.S. In her statement last Feb. 25, Pelosi lashed out at Republicans for refusing a clean D.H.S. bill, saying that they "trapped in a dangerous, anti-immigrant fantasy."

"With every House Democrat co-sponsoring clean D.H.S. funding legislation, it is clear this crisis only exists because Republicans prioritize anti-immigrant extremists over the safety of the American people," she said. "Republicans must end this madness and join Democrats to fund Homeland Security immediately."

Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson and former Homeland secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff got together to call on Congress to pass a budget for the D.H.S.

"There are concrete dramatic consequences for the homeland security of this nation if we allow the funding of the department to lapse," said Johnson. "There are consequences if we have to exist on a continued CR, another continuing resolution past Friday night. There are huge drawbacks to that, which I have talked about repeatedly, over the last several weeks. So we need – on behalf of the American public – a fully funded Department of Homeland Security."