Will Trump Force Congress Back to Washington to Reopen DHS?

Congress is still out of session despite the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) being shut down without funding, and members are not scheduled to come back to town any time soon.

As DHS’s crucial responsibilities go unfunded, some in Washington are discussing unusual measures to force Congress back into action.

On Friday, the House declined to consider a Senate bill which would have funded most of DHS but leave out funds for border security and immigration enforcement. 

The House opted instead to pass a 60-day funding extension for the agency.

House members, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., had called for Republican senators to attempt to advance the House-passed 60-day funding extension of all of DHS by unanimous consent at the pro forma session on Monday.

A pro forma session is a perfunctory meeting where no real business is conducted.

However, no senator attempted to do so.

The Senate is next scheduled to convene for legislative business on April 13, and the next pro forma session will be on Thursday, April 2.

Now, some are calling for the Senate to return to legislative work—whether it wants to or not.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has been calling for President Donald Trump to invoke his power under Article II of the United States Constitution to force Congress back into town to get to work.

No president has invoked this power since 1948, when then-President Harry Truman, a Democrat, called both houses of the Republican Congress back into session after they had already adjourned for the year.

“Trump has the power to convene the Senate under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution ‘on extraordinary Occasions,’” Lee recently wrote on X. 

“If a department with 260,000 employees (DHS) going unfunded isn’t an ‘extraordinary occasion’—especially while the Senate is out on a two-week recess during that shutdown with no plans to resolve the impasse beyond ‘we’ll deal with that in two weeks’—I don’t know what is,” added Lee.

On Friday, Trump told the New York Post he was open to invoking this power.

“It’s something that’s under consideration,” Trump said.

There are multiple major religious holidays approaching however, such as Easter and Passover.

“Maybe we’ll let them have Easter,” said Trump.

A clean 60-day funding extension would have difficulty advancing through the Senate, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has called it “dead on arrival” and has for weeks pledged not to provide additional funding for immigration enforcement without receiving policy concessions.

“We’ve been clear from day one: Democrats will fund critical Homeland Security functions—but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer said after the House passed its funding extension.

If Congress did return, there is little to suggest they could gather the seven Democrat votes needed to advance a funding package.

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