Once again, the GOP looks like they’re heading toward a government shutdown. In the latest talks, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looks like he might allow a vote on a clean DHS bill, while scheduling a separate vote defunding President Obama’s executive action. What’s not is whether the House and the anti-immigrant right wing will go along with this plan, considering that Steve King is already making noises about how this route doesn’t do enough to stop executive action. Since Steve King has more than once led the House on immigration, it’s not clear that Speaker Boehner would have the votes to pass a clean bill through the House without breaking the Hastert Rule. And there’s still the matter of how bad it looks for the Republican Party to be making their stand in favor of deportations and separating families.
Conservatives have been trying to cover themselves in case of shutdown, arguing, among other things, that DHS didn’t even exist before 2003 and so we don’t really need it. But new polling today from CBS paints a different picture — a majority of Americans would see a shutdown as a “major problem” or a “crisis,” and two-thirds of all Americans (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) believe that a clean DHS bill should be passed independent of any immigration riders. View the poll here or below:
