House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) announced that the House will vote on a clean Department of Homeland Security funding bill, which marks the conclusion of the Republican attempt to block funding for President Obama’s executive amnesty orders. Boehner told the Republican conference that the bill will get a vote on Tuesday.
“He said Pelosi could [force a vote] but he hoped it would be done by a GOP appropriator,” a Republican congressman in the meeting tells National Review Online.
The GOP lawmaker is referring to a little-known rule, known as Rule 22, that allows any House member to force a vote on a bill if the Senate refuses to create a conference committee. Senate Democrats filibustered the creation of a conference committee on Monday evening, thwarting the process by which the House and Senate might have ironed out the differences between the DHS appropriations bills passed by the two chambers. The original House bill blocked funding for the implementation of Obama’s 2012 and 2014 executive orders on immigration. The Senate bill did not block funding for the president’s amnesty.
In Tuesday morning’s conference meeting, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) reiterated his belief that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) should have used the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster in response to the Democratic votes to block debate on the House-passed DHS bill.
