The U.S. Capitol building.
WASHINGTON — Just hours before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was set to partially shut down, the U.S. House defeated a measure that would have kept the agency funded for the next three weeks.
Immediately after the vote, it was unclear whether Congress could move fast enough Friday night to avert a shutdown. Colorado lawmakers have been about how to overcome the DHS impasse.
In the late-afternoon vote, a majority of House Democrats, including all three from Colorado, helped sink the temporary spending bill by a tally of 203-224. Democratic U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette, Ed Perlmutter and Jared Polis all said they opposed the bill because it only would extend what DeGette described as an “invented political logjam.”
“For weeks, Washington has been consumed by a crisis of its own making,” she said in a statement after the vote. “Instead of doing the responsible thing, House Republican leaders refuse to consider a clean funding plan for the Department of Homeland Security and continue with this invented political logjam.”
More than 170 Democrats joined with 52 Republicans to beat the bill. Only 12 Democrats voted in favor of the measure. The one House Republican from Colorado who voted against the bill was U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs, who said he did it to show his opposition to President Barack Obama’s policies on immigration.
“I cannot support funding, even for a short period of time, the President’s unlawful executive action that violates the Constitution,” Lamborn said in a statement.
One possible motivation for Democrats is political gain. A found that the American public would blame congressional Republicans more than Obama for a DHS shutdown. But that CNN/ORC poll was taken before Friday’s vote.
Getting to this point has been a slow-motion train wreck.
Last year, Republican leaders in Congress were searching for a way to undo Obama’s executive action on immigration. What they came up with was legislation that only funded DHS through the end of February – a move aimed at giving them more time to develop a robust response.
But they have been stymied in recent weeks by Senate Democrats, who have insisted on a “clean” DHS funding bill that didn’t wade into the immigration debate.
The result has been a struggle by the Republican-controlled Congress to come up with a legislative solution that would fund DHS while addressing the concerns of party members who want to make a stand against Obama’s executive action.
That tension came to a head Friday night and led to the bill’s defeat.
