Senate Falsely Claims GOP Homeland Security Bill Would Shut Down Agency

Joe Guzzardi
February 17, 2015

With the clock ticking down to the February 27 deadline for Congress to fund the Department of Homeland Security, both sides of the aisle are ramping up their arguments.

Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse traveled to Mexico to get a firsthand look at border conditions. Sasse, who sits on the Senate Department of Homeland Security Committee and as a private citizen advised the agency, returned home convinced that the border is wide open, easy for terrorists to cross, and that lax enforcement creates the impression that the U.S. has too many immigration magnets that encourage aliens to enter unlawfully with the hope that they will eventually get citizenship.

Adding that the prospect of Jihadi entrants keeps him awake at night and that Congress is indifferent to improving dangerously weak enforcement, Sasse said that a single dirty bomber only has to be successful once to “kill a whole heck of a lot of Americans.”

At issue is Congress’ effort to pass a DHS funding bill. Republicans are determined not to provide the money necessary to underwrite President Obama’s unconstitutional immigration executive action that would remove five million illegal immigrants from deportation and reward them with work permits.

Senate Democrats have blocked the House-passed version of the DHS bill, H.R. 240, which would fund DHS through fiscal 2015 but excludes monies for Obama’s amnesty. Democrats are united that the Republican bill would potentially expose the U.S. to terrorist attacks. House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) charged that Republicans acted with “partisan recklessness” and suggested that failure to pass a bill Democrats support would force a DHS shutdown and gut security.

However, an Associated Press fact check which it describes as “an occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don’t tell the full story,” found that Pelosi and other Democrats have misrepresented the details.

AP pointed out a prime example when Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD.) threatened that if congressional gridlock results in a shutdown, the ports along the East Coast would close because there would be no Coast Guard to protect them. Mikulski said that without the ports, the economy would be decimated. However, AP found that the Coast Guard would remain operative and the ports, unaffected.

Because their duties are considered necessary to protect human life and property, DHS employees are classified as exempt and would stay on the job during a shutdown. Most DHS employees including the Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Customs and Border Protection including immigration agents would be unaffected. Those furloughed would be mostly administrative staff. AP concluded that even if DHS doesn’t get its full $40 billion allocation, the agency would continue operations with “little impact on national security.”

For all the attention national security gets in Congress, little if any time is spent on some of the most serious risks: fraudulent asylum laws that allow people from nations hostile to the U.S. to become permanent residents, failure to implement an entry-exit system to track foreign-born visitors, and the visa waiver system which gives nationals from 38 countries easy access to the U.S.

When Congress strengthens those programs, then Americans can rest assured that their lawmakers are sincerely worried about their well-being.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. Contact him at [email protected]