WASHINGTON – Bordering on dysfunction, Congress passed a one-week bill late Friday night to avert a partial shutdown of the Homeland Security Department, as leaders in both political parties quelled a revolt by House conservatives furious that the measure left President Barack Obama’s immigration policy intact.
The final vote of a long day and night was a bipartisan 357-60 in the House, a little more than an hour after the Senate cleared the measure without so much as a roll call.
That sent the legislation to the White House for Obama’s signature, and capped a day of bruising political battles and rhetoric to match.
“You have made a mess,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said at one point to Republicans, as recriminations filled the House chamber and the midnight deadline neared for a partial shutdown of an agency with major anti-terrorism responsibilities.
Even some Republicans readily agreed.
“There are terrorist attacks all over world and we’re talking about closing down Homeland Security. This is like living in world of crazy people,” tweeted Rep. Peter King of New York, a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
Hours after conservatives joined with Democrats to vote down a three-week funding measure, 224-203, the Senate presented a one-week alternative to keep open the agency, which has responsibility for border control as well as anti-terrorist measures.
That amounted to a take-it-or-leave it offer less than three hours before the deadline.
This time, Pelosi urged her rank-and-file to support the short-term measure, saying it would lead to passage next week of a bill to fund the agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year without immigration add-ons. Aides to Speaker John Boehner promptly said there had been no such promise made.
After the three-week funding measure failed earlier in the day, Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, slammed the House of Representatives.
“This is no way to govern,” he said in a statement. “No one would run a business, or state, or county this way. It’s time for the House to take up a clean bill to fund DHS for the remainder of the year. The time for political games is over.
“Everyone agrees that we need to fix our broken immigration system. We should have that separate debate in a constructive way.”
Sen. Cory Gardner, D-Colorado, also voted for the Senate version of the bill that passed earlier Friday by a 68-31 margin. He said ensuring national security is “the single most important job the federal government has.”
“Shutting down DHS would put that crucial mission in jeopardy, and could have disastrous consequences for our nation,” Gardner said in a statement. “Homeland security is too important to be used as a vehicle for political disputes.
Michael Cipriano, a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald, contributed to this report.
