House of Representatives approves legislation making entry even more difficult for refugees, but Obama has said he will veto and Senate is unlikely to vote on it

The House of Representatives has approved legislation that would make it even more difficult for refugees from Syria and Iraq to enter the United States, in a major rebuke to the Obama administration’s refugee policy.

With almost unanimous support from Republicans and 47 Democrats voting in favor, the House approved by 289 votes to 137 the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, which would require the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director and the director of national intelligence to each certify that a refugee was not a threat to national security before they were admitted to the United States.

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This certification would come on top of the pre-existing extensive screening process for refugees seeking admittance to the United States, which currently takes over 18 months.

The White House has already said the president will veto the legislation if it is also passed by the Senate. However, if today’s margin in the House was repeated in both chambers of Congress following a presidential veto, Congress could override such a veto. The measure is unlikely to receive a vote in the Senate because of the 60-vote super-majority needed to consider a bill under Senate rules.

Both chief of staff Denis McDonough and secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson were on Capitol Hill lobbying against the bill on Thursday. However, those efforts did not sway some Democratic skeptics.

New York Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney told reporters that he thought the bill represented a simple improvement to the process. “The administration is required to certify many things under federal law, and I don’t understand why the president couldn’t direct the heads of these agencies within 24 hours of the completion of existing process to make this certification or not. It adds no new time.”

The New York congressman said “it is offensive to me that we would stigmatize refugees and make victims of people who have suffered so much already” and said he did not think the bill did that, unlike the reactions of many governors and Republican president candidates to the refugee issue. Instead, he insisted it represented a simple step to provide certification to the preexisting screening process.

Democratic opponents of the bill such as representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri dismissed the legislation as something simply designed to make people feel better. However, he noted that there had been a failure among politicians of both parties to acknowledge “the very legitimate and very real fear that’s out there”. In doing so, Cleaver echoed remarks made to reporters yesterday by Democratic senator Tim Kaine, who complained that the Obama administration had not properly “explained [the vetting system for refugees] to the American public”.

Before the vote, Republicans were realistic about the bill’s dim prospects of becoming law but saw it as an important step in raising public awareness of the refugee issue. Iowa congressman Steve King told the Guardian said that the bill “brings the public’s attention to this”.

King said he thought the increased public attention would make it harder for Obama to veto the bill, and might even make it more likely an Obama veto could be overridden by Congress. However, King thought that the focus on the refugee issue “missed the point” and that instead “we need to destroy the caliphates and defeat the ideology of Islamic jihad”.

King said: “It’s the equivalent of going into emergency room with patients bleeding off of gurneys and going and getting a bucket and mop to mop it up instead of stopping the bleeding.”

His thoughts were echoed in part by Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who noted that many of his constituents had been worried about whether Syrian refugees had been properly vetted since before the Paris attacks.

The Kansas Republican saw this bill as prelude to a fight in December over the budget, seeing the possibility of attaching a rider on refugee policy to an appropriations (spending) bill. “I don’t think the president is gonna shut government down to bring Syrian refugees into this country and that’s the only way to get attention,” he said.

Yet for all the debate over refugees, some members worried that the debate would do little to address national concerns in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told reporters: “To the degree we have been able to identify those responsible for attacks in Paris, they have been by and large European citizens who have potential of travelling to the US without a visa.”

The California Democrat noted: “For those who seek to come do us harm, they are far less likely to choose a two-year process with a full vetting that refugees go through and much more likely to be among Europeans to come as tourists.”

The legislation now moves on to the Senate, which is expected to consider it in December after the congressional recess for Thanksgiving.