Himes says Congress has ‘gotten too used to using shutdowns’ for leverage

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said Sunday that Congress has grown too accustomed to shutting down the government as leverage to pass legislation, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) remains unfunded.

“We have gotten too used to using shutdowns as a mechanism of getting what we want legislatively,” the Connecticut Democrat told host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” 

“And what that implies is that people like TSA agents or folks that work in the federal government for the Department of Agriculture don’t get paid when one party throws a tantrum, right?”

Himes has repeatedly voted with his party to reject full funding of DHS as Democrats push for major reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Democrats have backed measures that would fund the rest of DHS but exclude ICE and some Border Patrol functions.

DHS has operated without funding since Feb. 14, with the ongoing 44-day lapse surpassing last fall’s government-wide shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history. That stalemate resulted from Democrats pushing for an extension to subsidies offered under the Affordable Care Act, which expired because of GOP opposition.

The current DHS shutdown, which followed a four-day, government-wide lapse in late January and early February, stemmed from congressional Democrats seeking reforms in the wake of federal officers fatally shooting two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis earlier this year. 

Those proposed reforms include requiring that federal immigration officers obtain a judicial warrant before entering private property and barring them from wearing masks while conducting operations. 

Early Friday morning, the Senate passed a bill via unanimous consent to fund DHS but not ICE and Border Patrol. The measure, which was passed while only a few senators remained on the floor, funded parts of Customs and Border Protection.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) slammed that deal as a “joke” on Friday. Later that day, Republicans and three centrist Democrats — Reps. Don Davis (N.C.), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) and Henry Cuellar (Texas) — in the lower chamber passed a bill funding all of DHS for two months. 

Gluesenkamp Perez defended her vote in a lengthy Friday post on the social platform X, writing that “I believe that it’s wrong not to pay people for their work” and calling some of her party’s demands “unattainable.”

“Walking away from DHS funding will not fix anything about ICE and it screws a lot of hard-working people,” she added. “Ideological purity that empowers a broken system and hurts working people is not what I was sent to Congress to be part of.”

Yet Himes, while noting his agreement with Gluesenkamp Perez on the ineffectiveness of shutdowns, pushed back on her final assertion. 

“This is not ideological purity. This is basic adherence to the law,” Himes said Sunday of his party’s demands.

The House stopgap measure has little chance of passing in the Senate given broad Democratic opposition, leaving lawmakers with no clear path out of the DHS shutdown.

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