Hoyer Discusses Need for House Republicans to Bring to the Floor a Clean Bill to Fund DHS for the Year on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer"

WASHINGTON, DC - House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (MD) appeared on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" this evening to discuss the need for Republicans to bring to the Floor a clean bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the entire fiscal year after House Republicans failed to pass their three-week Continuing Resolution. Below are excerpts from the interview and a link to the video. 

 Click here to watch the video.

“Well, the Majority Leader just said that we are going to be having further votes, which is good. My advice to the Majority Leader and to the Republicans would be bring up a bipartisan bill. That's what the Senate ultimately did and funded the Department of Homeland Security until the end of the fiscal year. That's what we ought to do. We can do that in a bipartisan fashion on behalf of the national security of this country, Wolf, and I am hopeful that that's what will happen.”

“Nobody wants to see the Department of Homeland Security shut down. That is why Senator McConnell decided after four attempts to do what the Republicans in the House of Representatives tried to do today, Senator McConnell came to the common-sense conclusion that was not going to work and the responsible thing to do was to fund in a bipartisan way [the Department of] Homeland Security for the balance of the year. I would hope that Leader McCarthy would follow Leader McConnell’s formula on getting us to where we need to be and then there's more than enough time to debate the grievances that the Republicans have with what they think is an action by the President of the United States that was not consistent with the law. They can introduce legislation. They control the Senate and the House. They can pass legislation. The issue here is we ought not go home tonight. Let me be very clear, we ought not to go home tonight without funding the [Department of] Homeland Security as the Senate has done earlier this week. That shows the path, and they ought to take it.”

“Well, in the process, what Senator McConnell found was that once they had those four votes on the House bill essentially that didn't pass, Senator McConnell did what was the rational, reasonable, common-sense thing to do. He went across the aisle and said look, ‘We have a disagreement, we are not going to solve it, let's fund the Department of Homeland Security,’ and 68 Senators voted to do that.  I’m sure that we would have a similar majority here to do the same thing. That's what we ought to do. That's what I’m hopeful we will do. That's what I certainly will support.”