Bill to fund department without any riders attached about Obama’s immigration plan passes House and sends seven months of funding to president’s desk

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will remain funded after months of drama as House Republicans folded on the issue of taking combative steps to overturn Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration.

The House passed a so-called “clean” funding bill on Tuesday, keeping the lights on at DHS through September. The bill passed, 257-167, as 75 Republicans – including a rare vote from the House speaker, John Boehner – joined with all 182 Democrats to avert a shutdown.

Republicans had long sought to use the DHS funding as leverage to try to reverse the Obama administration’s 2014 executive action that allowed 5 million undocumented migrants to remain in the United States, as well as a 2012 executive order that applied to so-called Dreamers, a subgroup of undocumented migrants who were brought to the US while they were underage and have clean criminal records.

Conservatives in the GOP originally wanted to use a potential shutdown of the entire government as leverage to overturn the executive order. However, a December compromise on the so-called “Cromnibus”, an overarching budget bill, lowered the stakes. Under that deal, most of the government would be funded for the entire year but funding for DHS would be continued for 60 days, a strategy which would avoid the political fallout of an entire government shutdown. The strategy failed.

After nearly a month of legislative ping-pong, which included a temporary, one-week extension of DHS funding, Boehner finally yielded. In remarks to his caucus on Tuesday just before Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress, Boehner said he didn’t want to risk a DHS shutdown, which he said “wasn’t an option” with the current level of threats to national security.

Boehner also didn’t think a short-term extension of DHS funding would be viable, particularly after a number of Republicans rebelled on a three-week extension of funding on Friday.

The House speaker had been the last hope of immigration hawks who hoped to go on the offensive against the White House now that the GOP has majorities in both chambers of Congress after the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, acquiesced on a clean DHS bill which the upper chamber passed last week.

Boehner maintained, though, that Republicans were still in a strong position to thwart Obama’s executive order because of ongoing litigation in federal court after a district court judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction blocking the executive order’s implementation in mid-February.

However, most legal observers expect the fifth circuit court of appeals in New Orleans to overturn the lower court’s decision and allow the executive order to go into effect.

Conservatives expressed their disappointment in the outcome of the vote, which they claimed was about executive power, not immigration.

I said “the House voted to cede its constitutional authority to the executive branch. This isn’t about immigration. . It’s about restoring the power of Congress to make law. Today’s vote will embolden this president and future presidents to use executive action when they can’t get what they want from Congress.”

In contrast, Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, one of the most prominent advocates for immigration reform on Capitol Hill, crowed in a statement the vote was “a huge victory for the United States and for American families”.

“I am glad we have stopped playing these dangerous budget and shutdown games for the time being,” he said.