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With just hours to go before the current funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security expires, it remains unclear exactly how this latest Capitol Hill battle is going to resolve itself. The Senate seems poised to pass bills largely mirroring the plan proposed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell earlier this week, under which Congress would fully fund the department through the end of the current fiscal year while simultaneously passing a separate bill that purports to block the deferred deportation immigration program that President Obama announced in November, known as DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Permanent Residents.)

Obviously, that second piece of legislation will be vetoed by President Obama and it鈥檚 already clear that there are not sufficient votes in either chamber of Congress to override that veto. Even if these bills do pass the Senate, it鈥檚 unclear what the House of Representatives will do given the fact that many hardcore Republicans have expressed an unwillingness to back down on the bill that they passed earlier this year which attempts to tie DHS funding to restrictions on the DAPA program. If they hold fast to that position, then funding for DHS will expire at the end of the day on Friday and tens of thousands of employees will either be furloughed or forced to work without pay because they are considered 鈥渆ssential鈥� employees.

In the long run, of course, the battle over DHS will be resolved somehow. The government shutdown of October 2013 lasted for two weeks but, in the end, it too came to an end and the same will be true here. Before we get to that point, though, someone will pay a political price, and聽it certainly looks like it will be the GOP that does so:

Chris Cillizza聽contends that the GOP has made several strategic mistakes in the course of this shutdown, and this could end up harming them in the future:

Arguments like this are unlikely to be very persuasive to the hard core conservatives that are pushing House and Senate Republicans to hold the line in the DHS funding showdown, however. Many of these people will likely point to the fact that the GOP never really suffered any repercussions from the 2013 government shutdown, and they鈥檇 unfortunately be right about that. While polling both during and immediately after the shutdown showed that the GOP in general, and congressional Republicans in particular, were paying a heavy political price for what had happened, it didn鈥檛 take very long for those numbers to reverse themselves. To a significant degree, that was due to the fact that the rest of October 2013 and the ensuing months was consumed with stories regarding problems with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, while much of 2014 ended up being consumed by news of war in Ukraine, the rise of ISIS, and other domestic and foreign political matters that pretty much pushed the memory of the GOP鈥檚 overreach in the autumn of 2013 out of the public memory. By the time Election Day came around in November of last year, the political calculus had changed so significantly that the Republicans ended up winning control of the Senate in one of the biggest changes in party control in that body since the end of World War II.

As of today, we鈥檙e even further away from the 2016 elections than the October 2013 shutdown was from the midterms. Given that, and the fact that the shutdown doesn鈥檛 really seem to have hurt the GOP at all, it鈥檚 hard to see how any Republican member of Congress is going to be convinced by Cillizza鈥檚 argument. Perhaps there will be a deal made before midnight on Friday, but even if it doesn鈥檛 happen, it seems unlikely that the American people are going to care about the events of February 2015 when Election Day rolls around next year.