House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill on Feb. 26, 2015, where reporters asked about the conflict over passing the homeland security funding bill.(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP)
WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders failed to muster the votes to pass a stopgap measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks, leaving the agency in jeopardy of a partial shutdown Friday night.
The Senate responded late Friday by passing - by voice vote - a one-week extension of funding. Senate leaders sent that bill to the House after 8 p.m. Friday in a last-ditch attempt to keep the department from running out of money at midnight.
It was not clear if House Republicans would be able to get enough votes to pass the one-week funding bill before the shutdown deadline.
The White House was preparing for a possible shutdown Friday as President Obama convened a meeting in the Oval Office with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and other administration officials, said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest.
Obama called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to get an update on legislative efforts and "ensure that the Department of Homeland Security does not shut down," Earnest said.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, under pressure from conservatives, attempted to advance the three-week funding measure to buy more time to fight over President 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 a Senate-passed bill, which was approved earlier Friday in a bipartisan 68-31 vote. The $40 billion Senate bill would have kept DHS fully funded 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 has already passed including the immigration provisions.
Earnest said Congress' struggle to find a final resolution to the funding fight "exposes the danger of playing politics with our homeland security."
A shutdown would result 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 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.
At the heart of the funding fight was a battle over immigration.
House Republicans wanted to use the DHS funding bill as leverage to derail 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
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