Conservatives Reject McConnell Plan to End Immigration, Homeland Security Stalemate

Conservatives urged Senate Dems debate
DHS Funding. (Photo: Jeff Malet/
Newscom/Via The Daily Signal)

by Josh Siegel, The Daily Signal: As the Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security nears, House Conservatives are fighting a new Senate plan for preventing a partial shutdown of the agency.

Under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal, his chamber would vote first on a measure to fund Homeland Security and then hold a separate vote on a bill to undo the immigration executive actions President Obama took in November.

By untying the immigration legislation from the Homeland Security funding bill, McConnell, R-Ky., hopes to make it harder for Democrats to oppose.

But very quickly, it became clear the strongest resistance to that plan will come from his own party.

“I have no interest in doing that or supporting that,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., in an interview this afternoon with The Daily Signal. “It’s more smoke and mirrors, isn’t it? It’s more designed to be able to look like you’re doing something to the folks back home when you know you are doing absolutely nothing.”

He added:
“I don’t know how you tell people back home that elections have consequences if we pass a clean Homeland Security bill. If we do, folks back home have the right to ask the question, ‘Would this have been different if Democrats were still in charge of the Senate?’ And I think the answer apparently is no: That elections don’t have consequences in the United States Senate. I think that’s unacceptable to the folks back home and it’s unacceptable to me. I have spent too much time and money trying to help Republicans get elected to the Senate to be told that it doesn’t make a difference.”Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican and outspoken opponent of Obama’s immigration policies, also came out strongly against passing a “clean” Homeland Security funding bill.

“Regarding the reported new Senate plan to have a ‘clean’ DHS funding bill separate from a vote on stopping the new royal amnesty decree, there is nothing ‘clean’ about allowing an illegal, despotic action in direct defiance of the U.S. Constitution, so I can’t support it,” Gohmert told The Daily Signal in an email.

With funding for Homeland Security set to expire Friday, and facing Democratic resistance to a House-passed funding bill, McConnell felt he had to compromise.

Senate Democrats haven’t allowed debate on the House-passed bill, which funds Homeland Security while undoing major portions of Obama’s immigration policy, including his recent executive actions and an earlier program that allowed immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to stay.

“I don’t know what’s not to like about this,” McConnell said. “This is an approach that respects both points of view.”

Even if McConnell could persuade seven Democrats to side with him in order to get 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, the House would have to approve his plan.

In a statement to reporters, Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, signaled that would not happen.

“The Speaker has been clear: the House has acted, and now Senate Democrats need to stop hiding,” Steel said. “Will they continue to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security or not?”

Boehner’s position reflects the challenge he will have in convincing enough House conservatives to back the Senate plan.

Conservatives argue that the urgency to pass legislation repealing Obama’s immigration actions goes away if the effort is not tied to funding Homeland Security.

A spokesman for Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., another hardline conservative, amounted McConnell’s proposal to a “cop out.”

“What McConnell has isn’t a plan but a cop out,” said Tristan Daedalus, the spokesman. “The whole point of restricting funds from being used for unconstitutional orders inside the funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security is to exercise the power of the purse. By divorcing these two pieces of the bill, the Majority Leader is showing that he is more concerned with acquiescing to the ridiculous demands of the Democratic Caucus than for standing up for the institution of Congress.”

Mulvaney, who has said in the past that he favors legal status for some of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. unlawfully, insists he is willing to compromise with opponents to the House plan.

For example, he would support the Senate if it were to pass a bill — still tied to Homeland Security funding — that only rejects Obama’s 2014 immigration actions, and not the president’s 2012 program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an initiative that benefits young immigrants.

But he will only give so much.

“I have told Senators privately and publically I am willing to vote for something less than what the House sent over,” Mulvaney said. “I am still prepared to compromise. I don’t want to make it look like I am one of those guys who is my way or the highway. But I will not support a clean Homeland Security bill. If he [McConnell] has the votes for that, God bless him. But I think he should count on folks willing to call it like it is, which is a ruse.”
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Josh Siegel is the news editor for The Daily Signal.

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