Harry Reid: GOP's immigration gambit does "nothing" to fund DHS

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is not impressed by the GOP's move to decouple the fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from a dispute over President Obama's immigration policies.

On Monday, Senate Democrats blocked a $39.7 billion bill funding DHS but preventing the president from moving forward with his plans to shelter up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation by offering them work permits. It was the fourth time Democrats have blocked the measure.

Facing that impasse, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Senate moved on Monday evening to separate the two issues, offering a standalone bill preventing the president from acting on immigration and clearing the way for a "clean" DHS funding bill without any immigration riders.

The move was seen as a tactical victory for Democrats, but Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said Tuesday that it still does not resolve the central problem of funding DHS, which will shut down at midnight on Friday unless Congress passes a spending bill.

"I can't imagine why we have fiddled around here for four weeks and not a thing has happened with homeland security," Reid told reporters at a news conference. "And what Sen. McConnell moved to the floor last night has nothing to do with homeland security."

Reid said, as he has before, that Democrats are willing to engage the GOP on immigration, but not under the threat of a DHS shutdown.

"We're happy to debate immigration. There are a lot of issues we would like to debate," he said. "But we are not going to do that until the Department of Homeland Security is funded."

He accused Republican leaders of kowtowing to the "ideologues" in their caucus, who have demanded a bill halting the president's immigration actions as a condition of funding DHS.

"The burden is on the Republicans," he said. "What they are doing is wrong for the country. Not only will be blamed, they should be blamed for what's going on."

McConnell said Tuesday that he's willing to move "very quickly" on a clean DHS funding bill in the Senate, and that he would hold a separate vote on Friday on legislation to block the President's actions on immigration. He declined to speculate on what the House would do with a clean funding bill.

Republicans have framed the separate vote on immigration as an effort to pin down those Democrats who have voiced opposition to Mr. Obama's immigration policies but refused to support a DHS funding bill tying the president's hands on the issue.

"It's another way to get the Senate unstuck from a Democrat filibuster and move the debate forward," McConnell said in a floor speech on Monday. "This is our colleagues' chance to do exactly what they led their constituents to believe they'd do: defend the rule of law, without more excuses."

"This vote will highlight the irresponsible hypocrisy of any Senate Democrat who claims to oppose President Obama's executive overreach on immigration, but refuses to vote to stop it," added Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

A federal judge ruled last week that the president overstepped his authority with his planned executive actions, and the White House asked the judge to put his ruling on hold and filed an appeal. In light of the legal wrangling, some Republicans have counseled their party to let the courts tackle the issue and pass a clean DHS bill.

"Leave it to the courts," Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Monday. "I think we have an excellent case."

McCain warned Republicans on Tuesday that they shouldn't count on Democrats taking the blame if DHS shuts down.

"Recent polling shows that the majority of the American people would blame Republicans and not Democrats," he said. "So it hurts us politically. But it also harms our ability to enforce our borders and do the work that the Department of Homeland Security does."

Several Democrats who accompanied Reid to the press conference Tuesday cited the range of global threats facing America as they pushed Republicans to fund DHS. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, noted a video released Sunday by Somali terror group Al-Shabaab that urged followers to attack Western shopping malls, including the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

"This is a time when we should be stepping up our security, not stepping down our security," she said.