Senate Passes Bill to Avert Homeland Security Shutdown - New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Friday passed a bill to finance the Department of Homeland Security, sending the legislation to the House, which now has just hours to avert a partial shutdown of the agency.

The spending bill for the department, which is set to run out of money at midnight, passed the Senate, 68 to 31. The measure removed restrictions on President Obama’s executive action on immigration that were included in a bill passed by the House.

House Republicans are now hoping to vote on a counterproposal — a measure to provide money for just three weeks — but the House Democratic leadership is campaigning against the short-term option, meaning Speaker John A. Boehner might need to produce the necessary 218 votes entirely from his own conference.

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The impasse over the Homeland Security agency reflects a broader fight in Congress over Mr. Obama’s immigration policies. But it also exposed deep rifts between House and Senate Republicans, who struggled in recent weeks to agree on a pragmatic path forward to both keep the agency running and express their displeasure with the president’s recent immigration action.

After the Republicans retook control of the Senate and increased their margins in the House in the November elections, both Mr. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, promised to reverse Congress’s pattern of hurtling from crisis to crisis, even over matters like appropriations that were once relatively routine.

But in their first big test, over funding the Homeland Security agency, the Republican leaders often seemed to be working from different playbooks, at times verging on hostile, with each saying it was time for the other chamber to act.

Even on Friday, with the funding deadline approaching, the House and the Senate found themselves working to advance divergent proposals, with no clear plan to reconcile the two.

And any short-term measure, like the one that House Republicans are pushing, would simply postpone the fight until March, eating up valuable legislative time that could otherwise be used to move forward on a Republican legislative agenda.

“I think we’re just pushing the pain until later,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois.

The funding stalemate also bodes poorly for any larger policy accomplishments this year. The impasse on the Department of Homeland Security has left lawmakers pessimistic that the 114th Congress will be able to work in a bipartisan fashion on more complicated issues.

The Office of Management and Budget has said that a vote to increase the nation’s debt limit will be necessary by mid- to late summer, and lawmakers were also hoping to take up trade policy, as well as at least a modest overhaul of the nation’s tax code — undertakings that now look increasingly imperiled.

“This is about our country,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, speaking on the Senate floor on Friday. “How many times can Republicans send us hurtling towards a cliff?”

A shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, administration officials warned, would have negative ramifications for the nation’s security. About 15 percent of the department’s 230,000 employees — about 30,000 people — would be furloughed, and those who are deemed essential would be expected to work without receiving their regular paycheck.

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