Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) offered to pass a clean appropriations bill funding the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year, but Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) balked, saying House Republicans must also back the McConnell offer.
McConnell also scheduled a Friday vote on legislation targeting President Obama’s November of 2014 executive orders on immigration.
“I don’t know what’s not to like about this,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. “This is an approach that respects both points of view and gives senators an opportunity to go on record about both.”
Senate Democrats have filibustered the House-passed DHS funding bill because it contains language blocking Obama’s executive orders. McConnell’s proposal defers to that filibuster, but Reid still won’t drop the filibuster until House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) also agrees to pass a clean DHS bill.
“We have to make sure we get a bill to the president, not that we send a hot potato to Boehner, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said Tuesday.
Reid’s statement is the explicit declaration of a position that Republicans have worried would become the default Democratic posture for the next two years.
“If the Democrats, as a minority in the Senate, can not only tell the majority what bills they can bring up and whether or not they can or can’t have amendments, but also feel like they have the power to tell the House what bills they have to pass, it’s going to be like this on every single issue,” a GOP aide told National Review Online two weeks ago. “If our leadership in the House and Senate want to go through this for two years, then capitulate; don’t fight.”