House GOP Advances Its Own 60-Day DHS Stopgap, Scheduling Late-Night Vote as Shutdown Hits Day 42

House Republicans moved forward Thursday evening with their own plan to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security for sixty days, scheduling a floor vote for late that night after the House Rules Committee adopted a procedural measure that would deem the underlying bill automatically passed upon adoption of the rule. The decision came after Speaker Mike Johnson flatly rejected the Senate's bipartisan bill, which had passed by voice vote in an overnight session early Thursday morning but excluded funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — two agencies the House Freedom Caucus considers non-negotiable and refuses to leave out of any funding deal.

The standoff represents the latest flashpoint in a shutdown that entered its 42nd day Thursday and has pushed TSA officer absenteeism to a record 11.83 percent nationally, with some airports reporting call-out rates exceeding 40 percent. President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing newly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to use available departmental funds to immediately pay TSA employees, a short-term fix addressing the pay crisis without actually ending the shutdown itself. House Democrats urged colleagues to simply bring the Senate bill to a vote, with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying, "If that bill is brought to the floor today, it will pass. And the shutdown will be over."

Johnson's competing measure would fund all of DHS — including ICE and CBP — at current spending levels for two months, with an attached voter ID requirement that House Republicans have demanded as part of any immigration deal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune immediately poured cold water on the plan, telling reporters he did not plan to reconvene the Senate and believed the House bill had "limited viability" in a chamber where every Democrat and several Republicans would oppose the voter ID provision. "The Senate already did its job," Thune said. "The House needs to do the same."

The procedural maneuver being used Thursday night was unusual. Rather than a traditional up-or-down vote on the final bill, the House Rules Committee designed a "self-executing rule" under which adopting the rule package would simultaneously be counted as passing the underlying DHS funding legislation. The approach has been used before on tax bills and budget resolutions, but it drew protests from Democrats who called it an attempt to bypass a direct vote Republicans feared they would lose. At least three moderate Republicans from competitive districts had privately told leadership they preferred the Senate bill's approach, creating uncertainty about whether Johnson could hold his conference even on a procedurally obscure vote.

The shutdown's practical effects have rippled far beyond airport security lines. FEMA emergency grants have been frozen, the Coast Guard has been operating without pay for the entire 42-day period, and several hundred federal immigration judges have been furloughed, grinding immigration court proceedings to a halt. A senior TSA official told reporters Thursday that if the shutdown extends another two weeks, the agency's reserves of voluntary call-out coverage will be exhausted and TSA may be forced to close security lanes at smaller regional airports entirely. Speaker Johnson is projecting the House will vote sometime after 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time — a window that has become increasingly familiar during a shutdown marked by brinkmanship at every turn.