Congress averts homeland security shutdown

WASHINGTON — Congress narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security late Friday.

Both the House and Senate passed a seven-day extension of funding for the agency, with the House acting just two hours before funding was set to expire at midnight. The House vote was 357-60. The Senate passed the measure by voice vote.

The successful last-ditch effort came after House Republican leaders failed to muster enough votes earlier in the day to continue funding the agency for three weeks.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rallied Democrats to support the one-week extension before funding expired. She said that voting for the seven-day measure would put Democrats on a path toward possible passage next week of a $40 billion spending bill that would fund the agency through the end of September.

The Senate passed that bill early Friday, but House Republicans refused to take it up.

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"This has been a day of confusion both here in the House and for the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security," said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., as she urged lawmakers to pass the one-week funding bill.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., also called for passage of the bill, saying that lawmakers would be abdicating their responsibility to the American people if they let DHS shut down.

A shutdown would have resulted in the furlough of more than 30,000 of the agency's 240,000 employees. Most employees are considered too essential to the nation's security to be furloughed, so they would have had to work without pay.

The department includes Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

President Obama called Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Friday night to "ensure that the Department of Homeland Security does not shut down," said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest.

Earlier in the day, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, under pressure from conservatives, attempted to advance the three-week funding measure to buy more time to fight over Obama's immigration policies. But 52 Republicans voted against his plan, and the bill was rejected 203-224. A dozen Democrats voted for Boehner's bill, but the rest opposed it.

House Democrats said the chamber should instead support the Senate-passed bill to fund DHS through the end of the fiscal year. But a block of conservative Republicans wanted the House to hold firm and continue to demand that the Senate pass legislation the House had already passed that would derail Obama's immigration programs.

Earnest said Congress' struggle to find a final resolution to the funding fight "exposes the danger of playing politics with our homeland security."

At the heart of the funding fight was a battle over immigration.

House Republicans wanted to use the DHS funding bill as leverage to stop Obama's executive orders on immigration. Obama issued those orders in November to protect about 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally in the USA.

The House passed a funding bill in January that included amendments to bar any of the money from being used to carry out the president's immigration orders.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tried to push that bill through the Senate four times, but Democrats blocked it. This week, McConnell changed strategy and allowed senators to vote on a "clean" funding bill free of the immigration riders.

The competing strategies in the House and Senate put on stark display the tactical divisions and competing political pressures for McConnell and Boehner.

Boehner is under pressure from conservatives and the party base to lead the fight against the administration, while McConnell has sought to position the new GOP-controlled Congress as a responsible governing party to build the GOP's case for winning the White House in 2016.

Contributing: Gregory Korte and Associated Press