"How about two bills?"
With just days before Department of Homeland Security funding lapses, furloughing 30,000 employees and forcing 200,000 more to continue working without paychecks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appears to be making
tentative steps toward separating the DHS funding component of the bill from the angry-fist-shaking-at-President-Obama component of the bill. But what McConnell really needs to be doing, if he wants to avoid a partial government shutdown in his first months as majority leader, is leaning hard on his counterparts in the House.
A few of what passes these days for "moderate" Republicans are pushing to avoid a DHS shutdown, but those are not the people House Speaker John Boehner traditionally listens to, and so House Republicans appear ready to take us at least to the brink of DHS shutdown:
The current thinking is that the funding deadline needs to be imminent before House Republicans can relent and consider a bill that strips out the immigration provisions for a later fight. Or a short-term bill, which was emerging as a distinct possibility, may be the answer. But as in the past, events can slip out of the leadership’s control and end up with no settlement and furlough notices going to thousands of agency employees while many others in jobs deemed critical will have to work without pay and only the expectation that they will ultimately get a check.
Some conservatives say they are willing to allow the Homeland Security funding to lapse since most employees would have to report to work anyway.
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, said, “It’s not clear what the impact is because there are a lot of things that are supposedly funded anyway, so the impact may be smaller than we think.”
Ah, yes, the old "the impact may be smaller than we think, so YOLO" theory of governance.
In fact, many upgrades, grants, and trainings—including the training of Secret Service agents to protect presidential candidates—would fall by the wayside.
Month two of Republican control of Congress: Will we or will we not see a partial government shutdown? It's almost like manufacturing crisis is a feature, not a bug, of today's Republican Party. The good news is that voters will properly blame Republicans, but the bad news is, that won't translate into any kind of immediate changes in how Republicans govern.