02.02.26 - The House’s Options for the Senate-Passed Funding Package
The Senate voted late Friday to pass five government funding bills, plus a two-week patch for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that’s meant to enable talks on ICE and Border Patrol reforms. The House has yet to consider the package and, as a result, parts of the government have shut down.
The question now, as House lawmakers return to Washington, is whether—and how—the House will pass the Senate’s funding package. We’ll dive into this below. This piece does not explore the likelihood of a deal on ICE and Border Patrol coming together in two weeks—a topic on which Republicans and Democrats are quite far apart.
For more on how Congress got here, check out last week’s issues of Unrig the Rules:
House Republicans’ (current) plan
The House Rules Committee meets today at 4PM ET to craft a rule that tees up the Senate-approved funding package (more on the “rule” in a moment). That package contains five appropriations bills that expire on September 30: Defense; Financial Services-General Government; Labor-Health and Human Services-Education; National Security-State; and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development.
The package also includes a two-week continuing resolution—a stopgap maintaining current funding—for DHS. As we covered last week, this patch would keep DHS running while Congress and the White House negotiate funding restrictions to address ICE and Border Patrol’s tactics in the wake of Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s murders. While we’ve seen proposals to rein in ICE and Border Patrol from Senate Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, the Senate’s package does not include any such guardrails.
In a statement late Friday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries was noncommittal on whether House Democrats would support or oppose the Senate deal. Reporting this morning suggests that some House Dems are inclined to support it, while leaders like Rep. Bennie Thomson—the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee—are opposed. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that, after talking with Leader Jeffries, he believed House Republicans would need to “probably do this mostly on our own”—meaning, he doesn’t think he can count on Democratic votes to get this bill through the House.
That brings us to the rule.
Math problems
Unless legislation has overwhelming bipartisan support, it comes to the House floor under a “rule” that sets parameters for debate—i.e., how long debate will last, how much time the bill’s proponents and opponents have to speak, which amendments may be considered, and so on. Bringing a bill to the floor under a rule allows the bill to pass with a simple majority vote.
However, the House must pass a rule with a simple majority vote before it can debate and vote on the underlying legislation. The House Rules Committee crafts the rule, which typically favors the majority party. Indeed, Republicans have nine seats on the Rules Committee; Democrats have four. As a result, votes on the rule are typically party-line with majority Members supportive and minority Members opposed—even if Members of the minority party might support the underlying bill.
That said, majority party Members’ support for the rule is not a given. House Republicans have voted with Democrats to defeat GOP-crafted rules multiple times this Congress, and GOP leadership’s margin for error hasn’t gotten any bigger. Democrats won a special election in Texas this weekend. Once the Speaker swears in Democratic Rep.-Elect Christian Menefee tonight, the House split will be 218 Republicans and 214 Democrats. Republicans won’t be able to afford more than one defection on party-line votes, assuming all Members are present and all Democrats vote together, as they typically do for the rule.
If enough House Republicans are salty that there’s even a discussion about new checks on ICE and Border Patrol—and some have made clear they’re not happy—they could vote down the rule and, accordingly, block the Senate’s package from even coming to a vote.
What’s Plan B?
If Republicans can’t pass a rule, the House could consider the funding package under suspension of the rules. In this case, there is no separate vote on the rule and the House simply votes on the legislation at hand.
However, the threshold for passing a bill under suspension is much higher than it is under a rule. Rather than a simple majority vote, a vote under suspension requires support from at least two-thirds of the House for passage. So, to pass the Senate funding package under suspension, at least 70 Democrats—the precise amount depends on the number of GOP defections—would need to vote to keep funding ICE and Border Patrol at current levels, without any new guardrails to deal with federal agents’ violence in Minnesota or disregard for constitutional protections.
Again, Leader Jeffries already told Speaker Johnson that’s not going to happen, so it’s not clear that this is truly a viable Plan B. At that point, perhaps Republicans look to the White House to ramp up pressure on GOP holdouts who have been known to fold, or look for concessions they could offer Democrats—but what those concessions could be is an open question.
Whatever happens, we’ll keep you posted.
If you’d like a live update for your group or coalition, reach out to catherine@webuildprogress.org. Thanks!