Roundup: Partisan fights on DHS funding continue as deadline looms

With the clock ticking towards a partial shutdown of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( DHS), House Republican leader John Boehner on Thursday still clamped his mouth shut on whether he would put a clean DHS funding bill up for a vote in the House.

Neither did his Democratic rivals give the assurance that they would agree to a short-term funding bill, favored by many Republicans, as the life-saving straw for the agency.

After Senate Democrats on Wednesday agreed to support a "clean" DHS funding bill proposed by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the new DHS funding bill was expected to sail through the Senate on Thursday.

It would then be sent to House Speaker Boehner for a vote. However, whether a House vote would be materialized was still unknown.

Speaking at a press conference prior to a closed meeting with his Republican colleagues on Thursday, Boehner repeated his "wait- and-see mode" on the Senate "clean" funding bill. Boehner said he was still waiting to see what would emerge from the Senate and insisted that Republicans in the two chambers were not at odds.

Unlike Congressional Democrats, uniting in their fight to block the passing of any funding bill that also attacks U.S. President Barack Obama's immigration policies, divisions emerged among Republicans on the issue during the almost month-long partisan DHS funding fight.

In his first official response to McConnell's "clean" funding bill on Wednesday, Boehner said he hadn't spoken to McConnell for two weeks.

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership in both chambers indicated on Thursday that the passing of a short-term funding bill for the DHS, instead of a full funding bill, was not an option.

"If they (House Republicans) send over a bill with all the riders in it, they've shut down the government. We're not going to play games," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who just lost the seat of Majority Leader to his Republican counterpart McConnell in November.

Speaking in a rather combative note, Reid left almost no wiggle room for Boehner. He said that any changes by the House to the Senate "clean" funding bill would be a "waste of time."

Democratic leader in the House Nancy Pelosi also said she would not give Boehner any "cover" to keep the DHS living on short-term lifesaver.

"It's not a question of giving him (House Speaker Boehner) cover. We're trying to give cover to the American people so that their homeland is protected," she said.

A previous House-passed DHS funding bill which entails measures to roll back Obama's immigration policies of 2014 had repeatedly hit a wall in the Senate for weeks, where Democrats demanded a " clean" funding bill.

After a federal judge recently ruled an injunction against Obama's 2014 immigration executive actions, a growing number of Senate Republicans urged their party leaders to grasp the escape hatch from the gridlock and left Obama's executive actions to the courts to handle.

However, the federal court order also made conservative Republicans in the House harden their stance to address what they see as a power overreach by Obama in his last year's unilateral move to launch immigration policies that would shield as many as 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.

If the partisan wrestling is not resolved by the midnight Friday deadline, spending authority will be cut off for the DHS that is charged with securing U.S. homeland and responding to terrorism and other hazards. Endite