President Donald Trump called on the Senate to return to Washington as the Department of Homeland Security shutdown continues with no end in sight.
"The president is also encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing Monday.
Trump recently signed an executive order to pay Transportation Security Administration employees, who had gone without paychecks since the shutdown began in mid-February.
But Leavitt said that was not the answer.
"The president just can't keep signing presidential memorandums and proclamations every time Congress fails to do its job," she said.
Leavitt said Democrats are "holding our entire country hostage" by "picking and choosing which programs and agencies they want to fund just because they don't like this administration's policies."
"That's not how it's supposed to work," she added. "They voted seven times against funding DHS over partisan and political reasons."
Over the weekend, House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to temporarily fund DHS and instead passed their own funding measure late Friday, extending a weekslong budget standoff that has disrupted travel.
The stopgap bill, which proposes funding DHS in full for eight weeks, passed by 213 to 203 votes after Republicans in the lower chamber refused to take up a Senate-passed deal that excluded money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
A funding measure "that locks in the status quo is dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
"Democrats will fund critical Homeland Security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump's lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms."
The late-night vote came after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called the earlier bipartisan Senate bill a "joke" for withholding money for the agencies responsible for carrying out Trump's controversial deportation crackdown.
The Senate immediately went on a two-week recess after voting to fund DHS.
Sam Barron ✉
Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.
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