Democrats bash Johnson for rejecting Senate DHS bill, urge support for discharge petition

House Democratic leaders teed off on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Friday for rejecting a bipartisan Senate bill to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), saying GOP leaders are voluntarily prolonging the partial shutdown to appease their most conservative wing. 

“The American people know Republican priorities have nothing to do with making their life better, and everything to do with jamming their extreme and radical right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said during a press briefing in the Capitol. 

“And Exhibit A today is the fact that House Republicans are rejecting a bipartisan bill supported by 53 Republican senators that would end the chaos at the airports, pay TSA, and stop inconveniencing millions of Americans.”

Behind Jeffries, the Democrats called on Johnson to stage an immediate vote on the Senate bill, which passed unanimously in the upper chamber early Friday morning, saying it’s the surest way to end a partial shutdown that ranks among the longest in history.  

“Republicans cannot continue to hold funding for airport security, disaster assistance and response for the Coast Guard hostage because they want an out-of-control ICE that brutalizes our communities, detains children and kills U.S. citizens,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. 

Short of a vote on the Senate bill, Democrats are urging moderate Republicans to endorse their discharge petition, which would force a vote on similar legislation to fund most of DHS — including Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and FEMA workers — but not U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

“We have a discharge petition that has been active and live,” said Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.), the Democratic whip.

The Senate bill funds most of DHS but, to win Democratic support, it withholds funding for ICE and Border Patrol. Democrats demanded the exclusion after federal immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier in the year. They’re pushing for tougher rules on ICE and CBP officers before they’ll support more money for those agencies. 

Johnson stunned Washington on Friday when he rejected the Senate-passed proposal and vowed instead to move an eight-week stopgap bill to fund the entirety of DHS, including ICE and CBP, at current levels. 

Johnson blamed Senate Democrats for “engineering” the bill, despite the fact that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) controls the floor. But the Speaker also took a shot at Senate Republicans for backing the package. 

“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill.”

Democrats panned that description, noting that the Senate bill would have paid TSA and every other DHS sub-agency — just not the immigration enforcement operations at the center of controversy in Washington. 

“Speaker Johnson is calling this bipartisan agreement a joke simply because it doesn’t give more money to Trump’s out-of-control ICE agency,” Aguilar said. 

The House is expected to vote on the eight-week stopgap bill on Friday night. But even if it passes, they’ll be sending it to an empty Senate, which left Washington earlier in the day for a long, two week break for the spring holidays. The development all but ensures that the DHS shutdown will become the longest in history. Democrats said Republicans did it by design. 

“They know this is a continuation of the shutdown because the Senate is gone,” Clark said. “The Senate is gone.”

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