House GOP searches for votes to reopen government with razor-thin majority

The House returns to Washington this week with plans to find enough votes in the narrowly divided chamber to reopen the federal government, which has been partially shut since early Saturday morning after funding lapsed.

It won’t be simple: Many House Democrats do not plan to support the deal Senate Democrats struck with the White House. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., last week that his party would not help pass the package without numerous additional restrictions on immigration enforcement, according to two senior House Democratic aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

If most Democrats do not support the package, Republicans will need near-unanimity to pass the funding package, which President Donald Trump has endorsed. But Johnson predicted on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that they would be able to end the shutdown “at least by Tuesday.”

“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson said, referencing a floor vote that is traditionally passed on party lines.

A procedural vote Monday set for a key committee stacked with several ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus members will provide an early test of whether the GOP can muscle the measure through on its own.

Last month, Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations committees negotiated a sweeping package that would have funded most of the federal government through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Many Democrats had already said they were uncomfortable supporting one part of that plan: $64.4 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration’s immigration raids in Minneapolis drew national attention after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renée Good last month, prompting mass demonstrations in the Twin Cities, and another ICE officer shot an undocumented Venezuelan man, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg during an arrest.

The House passed the initial funding package, primarily along party lines. But two days later, immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Senate Democrats returned to Washington demanding that Republicans separate DHS funding from the rest of the bill until the parties could agree on new accountability measures for immigration agents, including implementing a code of conduct and requiring that agents wear body cameras and identification.

The White House struck a deal with Senate Democrats to extend DHS funding for two weeks to buy time for negotiations while passing the remaining funding, which include appropriations for the Pentagon, the Health and Human Services Department and more. The DHS bill also covers the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.

That agreement passed the Senate on Friday evening. But because the changes had not been approved by the House, the unfunded agencies shuttered early Saturday morning.

House Republicans will have one vote to spare if every Democrat votes against the plan. Some House Democrats are considering supporting the package, but others have privately raised concerns that Senate negotiators won’t be able to achieve meaningful accountability measures - and some have said they would prefer if ICE is not funded this year, noting that the agency received $75 billion from last year’s Republican tax and spending law. (ICE would also be able to continue operating if it isn’t funded, drawing on that money.)

“We’re going to have to evaluate what the real opportunity is to get dramatic change at the Department of Homeland Security. It needs to be bold, it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be transformative,” Jeffries told reporters on Friday. “Absent a path toward accomplishing dramatic change, and making sure that ICE and DHS are conducting themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country, then Republicans are going to cause another government shutdown.”

Republicans will face their first hurdle Monday afternoon, when a House committee responsible for setting legislative rules - and with a unique power to make it much harder for bills to pass on the floor - will meet to consider the measure.

That panel, the House Rules Committee, is stacked with conservative hard-liners who have raised concerns with the bipartisan agreement. But Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is among those hard-liners, told Fox News on Saturday that he thinks they will advance the measure because “we don’t want to let our men and women in uniform get held hostage.”

Once the government is funded, he added, Republicans will push hard to ensure the DHS bill isn’t held in limbo after the two-week funding extension.

“ICE is law enforcement. They have a constitutional and legal duty to protect the American people. They’ve been doing that,” Roy said. “So we’re going to stand up for them.”

Another House Republican, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida), is demanding that the House attach a bill to the funding package that would require proof of citizenship during voter registration - which would send the measure back to the Senate again, further extending the shutdown.

“This is my price for a ‘yes’ vote,” Luna wrote Sunday afternoon on X.

Roy, the lead sponsor on the House’s Save America Act that Luna supports, indicated that he may be more flexible.

“We’re working with the White House and the speaker on the best processes,” he told Fox. “We’re trying to be responsible, do our job and follow the bipartisan agreement.”