President Donald Trump has urged the Senate to return to Washington this week amid a prolonged Department of Homeland Security shutdown that shows no end in sight.
The president is also calling on Congress to come back to Washington to permanently resolve the crisis and fund the full reopening of the agency, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Leavitt stated at a Monday press briefing that Trump recently signed an executive order to pay Transportation Security Administration employees who had gone without paychecks since the shutdown began in mid-February. However, she emphasized that this action alone is insufficient.
“The president just can’t keep signing presidential memorandums and proclamations every time Congress fails to do its job,” Leavitt said. She accused Democrats of “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,” Leavitt added. “They voted seven times against funding DHS over partisan and political reasons.”
In a separate development, House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security on Friday. Instead, they passed their own funding measure extending the weeklong budget standoff. The stopgap bill, which proposes eight weeks of full funding for DHS, passed by a vote of 213 to 203 after Republicans in the House refused to consider a Senate-passed deal that excluded money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Senator Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., stated that the bipartisan Senate bill “that locks in the status quo is dead on arrival in the Senate” and emphasized Democrats would fund critical Homeland Security functions but “will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called the earlier bipartisan Senate bill a “joke” for withholding money from agencies responsible for implementing Trump’s deportation policies.
The Senate immediately went on a two-week recess after voting to fund DHS.
