House clears DHS funding bill before vote on larger package

Washington — The House approved a measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday ahead of a vote on a larger package of bills that lawmakers are aiming to pass and send to the Senate before a shutdown deadline next week. 

In a 220 to 207 vote, seven Democrats joined all but one Republican to approve the DHS funding measure. 

After weeks of working through funding measures following the longest shutdown in history last year, House and Senate appropriators released the text of the final four bills earlier this week. The measures include funding related to the departments of Defense; Labor, Health and Human Services, Education; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development; and Homeland Security. 

Lawmakers face a Jan. 30 deadline to fund the remaining government agencies and programs. 

But GOP leaders faced hurdles heading into the day, with multiple groups looking to use leverage to extract concessions in the final funding fight until September. 

The House Rules Committee reconvened Thursday morning after members were unable to move forward with the funding measures Wednesday amid conservative opposition. Meanwhile, another faction of the GOP conference pressured leaders to include an ethanol provision that would allow the year-round sale of E15 fuel. 

The committee ultimately advanced the funding measures to the floor, teeing up a procedural vote on the funding measures that lawmakers narrowly approved later Thursday after House GOP leaders secured support from a handful of detractors. 

The DHS appropriations bill, which was originally expected to come as part of last week's funding package, was considered separately after facing pushback from Democrats following the deadly shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Democrats said they would withhold their support for the funding without ICE reforms. 

When the bills were released earlier this week, top Democratic appropriators acknowledged that the DHS funding measure would be insufficient for some members of their party, without broader reforms that some had sought. But they pointed to new restrictions on DHS' ability to allocate funds if it does not comply with reporting requirements, along with new training requirements for officers and $20 million for body cameras for immigration enforcement agents.

Top Democrats said they would oppose it anyway. Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the caucus chair, said Wednesday that he and other leaders told members they would vote against the DHS funding bill "unless there were substantive changes." 

"We shared our feelings with the caucus," Aguilar said. "But ultimately I imagine that members will vote their districts and they will judge the bill on the substance."

In a joint statement ahead of the votes Thursday, Aguilar, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made their position official, pledging to oppose the DHS funding bill. Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said at a news conference that "ICE is totally out of control, using taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens and law-abiding immigrant families."

"The American people deserve an immigration and customs enforcement agency that conducts itself in a manner consistent with every other law enforcement agency in the country," Jeffries said.

The measure ultimately picked up enough support for passage, with moderate Democrats crossing the aisle.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, urged lawmakers ahead of the vote to "listen to the common-sense reasonable Democrats who helped to put these bills together."

The speaker touted the funding bills more broadly, saying they would "fund the Trump agenda and Republican efforts to restore peace through strength, to defend our borders and to deport criminal illegal aliens, to rebuild America's infrastructure and to make America healthy again."

Republican leaders have pushed for a return to regular order in the appropriations process, pursuing the passage of all 12 appropriations bills rather than the last-minute "omnibus" packages that have become commonplace in recent years. Johnson celebrated the appropriations work on Wednesday, saying there were many people who claimed "that this could not be done, that a regular appropriations process is a thing of the past."

"Critics said our margins were too slim to bring it back, to rebuild that muscle memory that I committed to when I became speaker," Johnson said. "They said we had too many bills left to pass and too many disagreements left to reconcile. But I'm happy to report that all of those prognostications were flat wrong, and we've gotten it done."

After passing the House, the funding bills would head to the Senate for approval. They are expected to be packaged together with two other funding measures passed in the lower chamber last week. 

Consideration of the final six funding bills in one package will make for swifter passage in the upper chamber. But with only a handful of days until the funding deadline, and a winter storm threatening to create travel headaches for senators' return to Washington early next week, the Senate will have to work quickly to avert a partial shutdown.

In a surprise move on Thursday, the House also approved an amendment that would repeal a controversial provision that allows senators to sue for $500,000 if federal investigators search their phone records without their knowledge. The move effectively jams the upper chamber by including the repeal in the funding package without the necessary time to reverse course, giving the Senate no option but to approve it.