House gears up to take Senate’s government shutdown deal with rare Sunday meeting
The House of Representatives is preparing a rare weekend meeting as congressional leaders race against the clock on a partial government shutdown.
The House Rules Committee, which acts as a gatekeeper before most legislation sees a chamber-wide vote, is expected to meet on Sunday at 4 p.m. to consider a federal funding deal that is poised to pass the Senate on Friday.
It means the full House could vote on the bill as early as Monday, three days after Congress’ deadline to avert a shutdown.
The plans are still tentative and expected to be finalized ahead of a 4:30 p.m. House GOP strategy call on Friday afternoon, but they are a sign that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is looking to move with urgency once the deal passes the Senate.
Senate Democrats walked away from a bipartisan deal to fully fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year (FY) 2026 amid fallout over President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis.
Federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in the Midwest city during separate demonstrations against Trump’s immigration crackdown. In response, Democrats threatened to hold up a massive federal funding bill that also includes dollars for the departments of War, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation and others unless funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were stripped out.
The deal reached would fund all but DHS through Sept. 30, while funding DHS with a two-week extension of current spending levels to give Congress time to hash out a compromise that would include stricter guardrails on immigration enforcement agencies under the department’s purview.
It rankled House Republicans all the way up to Johnson, who signaled he was not happy with the outcome but would work with his counterparts in the Senate to quickly end the expected shutdown.
‘I’ve been very consistent and insistent that they should take the House’s bills that we sent over and negotiated very carefully in bipartisan fashion, and pass them,’ Johnson told reporters on Friday. ‘We can work out decisions in the area of DHS, but we should not interrupt the funding of government in the meantime.’
A senior GOP aide close to House conservatives said the two-week stopgap for DHS was ‘crazy.’
‘That hands more leverage to Democrats to derail immigration enforcement, and we’d be right back here again in two weeks with more crazy demands from the radical Left,’ the aide told Fox News Digital.
Whether the legislation will survive the House Rules Committee remains to be seen.
Three members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Morgan Griffith, R-Va. — sit on the panel. Roy and Griffith have not said how they feel about the deal.
But Norman told Fox News Digital after details emerged on Thursday, ‘THERE IS NO RATIONAL REASON TO REMOVE DHS FROM THE APPROVAL PROCESS.’
Norman accused Democrats of trying to ‘demonize’ and ‘bludgeon’ DHS, adding, ‘IF THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO SHUT THE GOVERNMENT DOWN, ‘DO IT’!!’
