Senate Republicans who are scrambling to end the two-month shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fear that Democrats will trigger an even bigger government shutdown in October and are working out strategies to avert that politically disastrous scenario.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) plans to pass a budget resolution through the Senate this week that would serve as a blueprint for a budget reconciliation bill Republicans are aiming to pass later this spring. That measure would bypass a Senate Democratic filibuster to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol through 2029.
But there’s growing concern among GOP senators that even if Congress funds ICE and Border Patrol for the next three and a half years, Democrats will provoke a fight in September to trigger yet another government shutdown.
The current shutdown of DHS is the longest in history, breaking the record set last fall when the government was shut down for 43 days over Democrats’ demands to extend health care subsidies.
Republicans say they’re worried the regular government funding process has become irreparably broken after two bruising funding standoffs during President Trump’s second term.
“I’m very concerned about the appropriations process,” Thune said, predicting that Democrats will never agree to fund ICE and Border Patrol while Trump is in office.
Other GOP lawmakers also suspect Democrats would embrace a battle over government funding, knowing that another shutdown would inflict more political pain on the party in charge of Congress and Washington.
“You can bet on it that that’s Chuck Schumer’s game plan, to shut the government down at every chance he gets,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who said he favors passing whatever legislation necessary to avoid yet another government shutdown in the fall.
Democrats, to be sure, have repeatedly rejected accusations that they are playing politics with government funding. Instead, they say, they are using some of the only leverage they have in a GOP-controlled Washington to try to advance popular priorities, such as extending ObamaCare subsidies or reforming immigration enforcement.
Still, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicted during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) will find another reason to block government funding in September.
“I will wager, right now, $100, that Schumer intends — on Oct. 1 — to do the same thing, to shut the whole federal government down for a month, so that on Election Day, the government is shut down, you have four-hour lines again in airports, and the Democrats can say, ‘See, the Republicans are in charge, they don’t know what they’re doing,’” he said.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he also thinks it’s likely that Democrats will force another government shutdown, seeing it as the “more chaos, the better” before Election Day.
Thune said Republican lawmakers are discussing strategies to pass competing proposals sponsored by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) to either require that essential federal workers get paid during a shutdown or to automatically enact stopgap government funding measures to avoid future shutdowns.
Senate Republicans discussed those measures at a lunch meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Both Johnson and Lankford talked about their proposals, according to a person briefed on the internal discussion.
“I’m for that, I think that’s a great idea,” Thune said of legislation to soften the impact of a government funding lapse.
“Anything that we can do that would ensure that the Democrats don’t decide once again to play partisan political games with the functioning of our government would be a good outcome,” Thune said.
“We are seriously talking about what’s the best way to execute on ensuring that at least government employees continue to get paid in the middle of a government shutdown,” he added.
One idea floated has been to attach legislation to prevent or soften government shutdowns to the budget reconciliation package that Republicans plan to pass in the next several weeks. The legislation would move on a procedural fast track, bypassing a Democratic filibuster.
But there are questions about whether the Senate parliamentarian would rule that government shutdown language complies with the chamber’s stringent Byrd Rule, which decides what is allowed to pass with a simple-majority vote under the reconciliation process.
Thune said there is a “ton of support out there among all the labor unions” to enact legislation to pay essential federal workers during government shutdowns, but he questioned how the parliamentarian would rule.
The Senate voted 52-46 on Tuesday to proceed to the Senate budget resolution, setting up a late-night series of votes on amendments to the measure for later this week.
Republican senators have also suggested that government shutdown legislation could be attached to the bill passed by the Senate before Easter to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE and Border Patrol.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to bring that Senate bill up for a vote in the House, telling reporters Tuesday that he wants to wait until the Senate passes the budget reconciliation measure to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next three and a half years.
Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, has reached out to House colleagues, hoping that conservatives might feel more inclined to support the Senate-passed Homeland Security appropriations bill if it is attached to legislation that would prevent another government shutdown.
“What I’m suggesting … is talk to the House, say pass the Senate DHS funding bill and add to it Shutdown Fairness Act, send it back to the Senate,” Johnson said. “The House is reluctant to pass the Senate [Homeland Security appropriations] bill. This would be an inducement to the House.”
Sen. Johnson has introduced the Shutdown Fairness Act, which would ensure that federal workers who are deemed essential and required to work during a shutdown will receive paychecks during that time.
The proposal would mandate that critical workers such as air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration employees continue to receive paychecks even if government funding lapses.
It would alleviate the backlogs that snarled airports around the country during last year’s record 43-day government shutdown and this year’s partial shutdown of the Homeland Security Department.
Johnson said his proposal has strong support from federal workers’ unions and urged his Senate Democratic colleagues to back it as well.
Lankford has introduced a competing proposal, the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, which would automatically implement two-week government funding stopgaps if Congress fails to pass its appropriations bills on time.
The legislation would prohibit taxpayer-funded travel allowances when those automatic continuing resolutions are triggered to force lawmakers to stay in Washington until the funding stalemate is resolved.
“We’re both trying to solve a problem,” Lankford said, comparing his and Johnson’s government shutdown bills. “His bill funds the pay [for federal workers], which is obviously extremely important. But the challenge is it doesn’t encourage us to then finish our work.”
Lankford said members of the Senate Appropriations Committee favor his bill because it puts pressure on lawmakers to keep working to pass appropriations bills.
Under Lankford’s bill, which has received past support from Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan (N.H.), lawmakers would “have to stay in session seven days a week and have to remain until we finish the appropriations work, and you can’t move to bills other than appropriations.”
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