Graham warns GOP would be blamed for DHS shutdown

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday the U.S. is facing more terrorist threats than ever and defunding the Department of Homeland Security would be the worst possible thing to do.

Some Republicans aren’t supporting a bill to fund the agency unless it scuttles President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. But the South Carolina senator said he hopes fellow Republicans will allow the immigration issue to play out in court after a federal judge in Texas issued an injunction last week blocking Obama’s immigration actions. Graham said he supports the judge’s decision.


If Republicans fail to fund DHS, he said, they’ll get blamed as a party.

“I’ve never seen more terrorist organizations … that want to strike the homeland than I do today, and that’s a direct result of a failed foreign policy by President Obama,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And the worst thing to do is having the Republican Party add gasoline to the fire by defunding the Department of Homeland Security.”

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “it’s absurd that we’re even having this conversation about Congress’s inability to fund Homeland Security in these challenging times.”

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is a result of the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy, Graham said, and Republicans have “to talk openly about the hard things, like having boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq … as part of an international regional force to make sure we degrade and destroy.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Ohio Gov. John Kasich , another Republican weighing a bid for the White House, said that “at some point it will require boots on the ground from the world to be able to deal with this problem.”

“And I would rather deal with it sooner than later, but you just don’t go running over there. You’ve got to have a battle plan, you’ve got to figure out exactly what you’re going to do,” Kasich said, “but I would never suggest that we should engage in nation building, or trying to convert all these people to our way of life. We need stability, and we need to stop this.”

Graham said the effort to degrade and destroy ISIL won’t be successful if there isn’t an American presence.

“The regional forces in the Mideast do not have the capacity, in my view, to do the job without some American help, foreign air controllers, intelligence gathering, special forces, embedded trainers,” he said. “Three thousand troops in Iraq is too many to be hostages and too few to get the job done.”