House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is pressing the Senate to pass the House-passed Department of Homeland Security bill that defunds executive action.
At his Tuesday morning news conference, the Ohio Republican highlighted Senate Democrats who have been critical of President Obama’s executive actions and called on them to follow through.
“There’s a whole host of Democrats who issued press releases criticizing the president’s executive overreach,” Boehner told reporters. “[Claire] McCaskill (D-MO), [Joe] Donnelly (D-IN), others. Was it all talk?”
The Senate is expected to hold its first vote on the House-passed Department of Homeland Security bill Tuesday. However, Senate Democrats have said they will work to block the bill.
Boehner stressed that the House has done its work to defund executive amnesty and now it is time for the Senate to act.
“We’ve won this fight in the House,” he said. “Now the fight must be won in the United States Senate. It’s time for Sen. Cruz and Sen. Sessions and Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats to stand with the American people and block the president’s executive actions.”
Boehner dismissed concerns that if no agreement is reached by February 27, the Department of Homeland Security would run out of funding.
“I don’t think anybody wants to shutdown the Department of Homeland Security. What we want to do is we want to block the president’s executive actions that were beyond the law,” he said.
“The goal here is not to run DHS out of money. The goal is to stop the president’s executive overreach,” Boehner said.
When asked about possible next steps should the effort fail in the Senate, Boehner added, “Why don’t we wait until the United States Senate acts and then we can decide what the next step is.”