WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is urging Congress to end its two-week recess and return to Washington to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which is currently experiencing a partial shutdown, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday.
Lawmakers left the Capitol last week with no deal to fund the department, extending what is already the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history.
“He’s said it repeatedly,” Leavitt said, adding that the president has said “he’ll host a big Easter dinner here at the White House if Congress will come back and fight the Democrats on this issue, which we should do, because, again, [the] Democrat Party is in the wrong here.”
After over 40 days of funding deadlock, there was a glimmer of progress last week. In the early hours of Friday morning, the Senate passed a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), excluding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and certain parts of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
House Republicans rejected the Senate bill and instead passed their own legislation that would fund the entire agency for 60 days.
The House and Senate ultimately left town with no compromise, and are currently scheduled to be out for recess until mid-April.
“The president just can’t keep signing presidential memorandums and proclamations every time Congress fails to do its job,” Leavitt said. “And every time Democrats are holding our entire country hostage, picking and choosing which programs and agencies they want to fund just because they don’t like this administration’s policies. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
Several other DHS agencies remain without funding, with employees not getting paid at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and civilian employees in the Coast Guard.
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons on Monday told reporters it “wouldn’t solve anything” for the president to try to call the Congress back from recess, insisting that the House needs to pass the Senate’s funding deal.
“Ultimately late last week when Republicans were unwilling to put those reforms into the bill and thus into the law, Leader [John] Thune said we are just going to fund all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol. One hundred of us agreed on that. We left. There is no point in calling us all back because that was the result of a conscious choice by the Republican majority,” Coons said.
