1st LD: U.S. Senate passes clean DHS funding bill

U.S. Senate on Friday passed a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without any provisions to attack U.S. President Barack Obama's contested 2014 immigration policies.

The bill, passed by 68-31 in the Senate, would cover the DHS through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Unlike the contested House-passed funding bill, the Senate bill does not entail any provisions to roll back Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration which would shield as many as 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.

The Senate clean DHS funding bill will then be sent to the House of Representatives for a vote. However, House Speaker John Boehner, who put forward his own three-week short-term DHS funding bill on Thursday night, would not likely to put the bill up for a vote in the House.

House Republicans on Thursday night offered a plan of a short- term funding bill as the temporary patch to save the DHS from running out of money by midnight Friday.

The new plan, pitched by 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 one week ago that had repeatedly hit a wall in the Senate for its anti-immigration provisions.

Earlier Friday, Boehner's stopgap bill cleared the procedural vote and was to be voted on later Friday in the House.

Meanwhile, as part of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's two-vote plan to avert the partial shutdown of the DHS, another motion which separately attacked Obama's immigration policies failed to move forward in the Senate as expected by many, since Senate Democrats earlier made it clear that they would not agree to address Obama's 2014 immigration policies before nailing down the DHS funding issue. Endite