Historic Shutdown Ends, GOP Focuses on Funding ICE: BGOV Budget

Voice Vote Masked Hardliner Resistance

Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to members of the media.

Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg

Seventy-five days after shutting down Feb. 14, the Department of Homeland Security is open again.

House Republicans relented and passed a Senate-approved deal to reopen the department without money for ICE and Border Patrol and anticlimactically passed the bill (H.R. 7147; BGOV Bill Analysis) by voice vote yesterday.

However, there was still resistance to the vote. The House conservative wing pressured Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to let the bill sit for more than a month after the Senate passed it initially, objecting to the bill’s accompanying language for explicitly zeroing out funding ...