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GOP offers short-term DHS funding bill to delay looming shutdown

Xinhua, February 27, 2015 Adjust font size:

House Republicans on Thursday night proposed short-term funding as a temporary patch to save the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from running out of money in less than 30 hours.

The stopgap bill, if passed in both chambers, would continue to fund the government agency in the next three weeks starting Saturday.

The offer, pitched by House Speaker John Boehner to his Republican caucus in a closed meeting on Thursday, was the first sign that House Republicans, like their colleagues in the Senate, was considering a change of course after passing a contested bill one weeks ago that had repeatedly hit a wall in the Senate for its anti-immigration provisions.

Boehner said earlier that the current DHS budget impasse may cause the department to shutdown.

The Senate has been stuck in a gridlock for almost a month over a House-passed DHS funding bill that would cover the agency through Sep. 30, the end of the current fiscal year while rolling back President Barack Obama's contested 2014 immigration policies.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday outlined his new two-vote plan aimed at moving the DHS funding bill forward in the Senate.

McConnell said he was willing to put forward a "clean" DHS funding bill while separately addressing Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration in a new stand-alone bill.

Senate Democrats gave the McConnell plan the green light, but till now, Boehner had been mute on whether he would put a clean DHS funding bill up for a vote in the House.

Whether Democrats in both chambers would support Boehner's stopgap bill was unknown.

However, speaking in a rather combative tone before the Republican meeting on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who just lost the seat of Majority Leader to his Republican counterpart McConnell last November, refused to 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.

"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 Reid at a press conference. Endi