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A partial government shutdown on Friday is looking more likely after a second fatal shooting in Minnesota involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Soon after the killing of US citizen Alex Pretti, some Senate Democrats who supported the bipartisan deal to reopen the government in November said they would oppose a six-bill funding package if it includes the Department of Homeland Security.
That leaves the broader funding measure short of 60 votes; Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Saturday night that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”
Senate Democrats will next discuss their strategy as a group on Sunday evening, with an in-person caucus meeting scheduled for Wednesday. On Friday evening, funding for large swaths of the government will run out.
A shutdown had looked difficult — but possible — to avoid before Pretti’s death, thanks to Republican leaders’ bid to combine DHS money with other agency funding bills that are more popular with Democrats. Republicans were confident Democrats would help pass the measure as recently as Saturday morning.
But there is now no clear path to funding DHS, or the rest of the government, if the funding stays joined after the shooting of Pretti.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., who voted repeatedly to fund and reopen the government last fall amid a record 43-day shutdown, said on Saturday afternoon that she would support five of the House-passed bills funding the rest of the government but “will not support the current Homeland Security funding bill.”
That’s a big blow to the package because she had been pitching her colleagues on a different approach than a DHS shutdown, instead proposing Democrats use nearly $75 billion in ICE money from the GOP’s tax cuts law to fund local law enforcement agencies.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said even before the 37-year-old Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis that he couldn’t vote to fund the department after another US citizen, Renee Good, was shot by ICE earlier this month in the city.
And Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., another senator who supported reopening the government in November, said on Saturday she would “be voting against any government funding package that contains the bill that funds this agency, until we have guardrails in place to curtail these abuses of power and ensure more accountability and transparency.”
ICE is now conducting operations in Maine, a state represented by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and the Republican chair of Senate Appropriations, Susan Collins.
King was one of three Democratic Caucus members to oppose the shutdown from the beginning last fall, while Collins is in one of the toughest reelection races in the country; she asked the Trump administration for more information about the ICE surge in Maine.
A spokesperson for King declined to comment on Saturday.
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Republican leaders need at least seven Democratic votes to break a filibuster on the House-passed government funding legislation, which bundled together six bills — including a DHS spending bill that narrowly cleared the House last week.
Several agencies were already funded for the remainder of the fiscal year under a bill that’s already passed both chambers of Congress and one signed by Trump last year.
Democrats could also attempt next week to strip the DHS component from the legislation and fund the rest of the government while the ICE political fight continues to play out. However, that would require at least a majority in a Senate where Democrats control only 47 votes.
Democrats have little leverage in Washington right now, relegated to the minority in both the House and Senate. And even a DHS shutdown would have limited impact because of the billions of dollars Republican leaders supplied last year as part of the party-line tax bill, which allowed ICE to operate during the longest government shutdown in history last fall.
Room for Disagreement
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has been trying to steer Democrats away from any shutdowns. And Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. — her party’s top appropriator — argued last week that a shutdown wouldn’t rein in ICE.
On Saturday night she said she couldn’t support the DHS funding bill, saying it “needs to be split off from the larger funding package.”
Burgess’s view
As I reported soon after Good’s shooting, Democrats lack options for substantively curtailing ICE beyond public condemnations and raising awareness. They can shut down DHS by mounting a filibuster, cutting off the $10 billion in annual funding to ICE, but the GOP tax law’s huge pot of money for immigration enforcement would continue to flow.
Still, Democrats feel like they were on the right side of public opinion on the health care shutdown fight in the fall. They seem to feel the same way now about responding to ICE forcefully, even if it threatens another shutdown.
Much depends on how Senate Majority Leader John Thune decides to handle the floor votes on the funding bill and whether Democrats get a vote to strip out DHS funding from the package.
Either way, any plan to avoid a shutdown will need 60 votes to even get on the Senate floor. If Democrats vote against government funding again, prepare for President Donald Trump and his Senate GOP allies to talk even more loudly about gutting the filibuster.
Notable
- Seven House Democrats voted with Republicans to advance the DHS funding bill on Thursday, as NBC reported.