1st LD Writethru: U.S. top lawmaker says House to vote on Senate's clean DHS bill Tuesday

With dwindling options and a looming shutdown in America's homeland security agency, House Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday broke the silence one week after the Senate offered a clean funding bill and said instead he would let the House vote on it in the day.

"I am as outraged and frustrated as you at the lawless and unconstitutional actions of this president," said Boehner in the weekly Republican meeting. "I believe this decision - considering where we are - is the right one for this team, and the right one for this country."

After the Senate on Monday rejected a House-passed motion to enter a conference between the two chambers on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding issue, the House Republican leadership were almost running out of options. Congressional Democratic leadership had earlier warned that Democrats would go great lengths to block any new moves by the Republicans.

A temporary seven-day DHS extension funding bill hastily passed the Congress Friday, two hours before a partial DHS shutdown began.

Boehner said a DHS shutdown would be harmful to national security.

"With more active threats coming into the homeland, I don't believe that's an option," he said. "Imagine if another terrorist attack hits the United States."

Boehner's announcement Tuesday was the major change of course for the House Republican leadership, whose own DHS funding bill caused a serious gridlock in the Senate, where Democrats demanded a clean DHS funding bill that contained no provisions to attack President Barack Obama's contested 2014 immigration policies.

To break the stalemate in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Feb. 24 offered a clean DHS funding bill but was criticized by his own Republican colleagues in the Congress.

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

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.

The federal court order, however, 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. Endite