Republicans in control of Congress, unable to agree on how to respond to President Obama's immigration policies, could miss a deadline they set for themselves to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which expires Friday. Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the majority leader, plans to hold a vote on a temporary bill that would extend funding for another three weeks. You might ask whether there's any point to setting an arbitrary deadline for yourself if you're just going to push it back when you realize you can't meet it. In fact, though, Boehner's bill confronts opposition from both Democrats who view this as nonsense and conservative Republicans who view it as a concession. It's unclear whether he has the 218 votes he needs to pass it. If the bill fails, the deadline will not be postponed, and the department's funding will expire. In other words, Congress is becoming so dysfunctional it can barely kick the can down the road anymore.

What's in Wonkbook: 1) House moves toward Homeland Security stopgap 2) Long reads, including Drutman and Teles on Hill staffers 3) Opinions, including Barro on the middle class

Map of the day: There were 76,086 llamas in the U.S. in 2012, and most of them were concentrated in the Pacific Northwest and in Arizona. Christopher Ingraham in The Washington Post.

1. Top story: DHS shutdown may be averted for 3 weeks

House leaders are proposing a stopgap that would extend funding into next month, but the vote will be close. "House Democrats said they are whipping against the measure, which could make it difficult for Republicans to win the 218 votes necessary for passage given grumbling from some on the right that the measure would do nothing to attack President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. ... If it becomes law, the short-term measure would extend the fight over Obama’s immigration policies into the third month of the new Republican-controlled Congress. It would further underscore intraparty divisions between House Republicans, who want to stop the president’s immigration actions at all costs, and Senate Republicans, who want to move on." Scott Wong, Rebecca Shabad and Cristina Marcos in The Hill.

And what the Senate will do with the bill if it passes depends on Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the minority leader. "Republican members said the leadership presented the plan as a way to allow time for the House and Senate to try to go to conference on their competing bills. But Senate Democratic leaders have rejected the idea of a conference. ... Reid declined to say whether he would try to block a short-term stopgap bill if the House passed one. " Sean Sullivan in The Washington Post.

Whatever happens, March could be an embarrassing month for Republicans. "The House bill will leave the House and Senate just three weeks to bridge their fundamental differences on funding the department for the long term and blocking President Barack Obama’s changes to the enforcement of immigration policy. On top of that, Congress must update a complicated Medicare reimbursement formula for doctors. And it needs to pass a budget. The coming March logjam represents a major failure for the Republican Congress. GOP leaders vowed to avoid them, but legislative cliffs are back." Burgess Everett and Jake Sherman at Politico.

Another thing: why do we even have a Department of Homeland Security? "Misgivings about DHS, held by members of both parties, have been steadily growing in the years since then-President George W. Bush proposed the creation of a new agency assembled from a motley collection of disparate parts ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the Coast Guard to the Secret Service. ... Forged in 2002 in the panicked aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the department remains the source of the least cost-effective spending in the federal government. Many outside DHS view it as a superfluous layer of bureaucracy in the fight against terrorism and an ineffective player in the ongoing efforts to handle natural disasters and other emergencies at home... Even the department’s name — spawned from the German word Heimatland — strikes many as 'creepy.' " John Hudson in Foreign Policy.

Philosophy of fashion interlude: A fierce and widespread debate over an image of a dress that appears to some as blue and black and to others as white and gold seized the Internet in a matter of hours Thursday night. It's a conversation with important implications for how we understand reality, the mind and the collective epistemology of the digital commons. Matthew Yglesias at Vox.

For the sake of democracy, Congress needs a permanent staff, and they need to be well paid, argue Lee Drutman and Steven Teles. They write that people concerned about money in politics have long tried "to deflate the pressure that powerful interests can bring to bear on government by reducing their campaign spending, or to counter that pressure by getting the elusive saviors of our democracy — 'the people' or 'moderate voters' — to pay attention and demand accountability, or even just to show up to vote. Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that these strategies have failed. ... In an earlier era of wealth inequality and highly partisan politics much like our own, progressives succeeded in partially insulating the executive branch from partisan and business pressure. They did it through the creation of a civil service system that professionalized government in a way that allowed it to build up the capacity and expertise necessary to tame some of the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism." The Washington Monthly.

Goldman Sachs never found out that one of its senior investment bankers, Julissa Arce, was hiding something. "The overachievers at Goldman Sachs aren’t all the same. Some have been valedictorians, or Navy SEALs, or the sons or grandsons of the company’s bankers. Some will stop at nothing to amass a fortune; others are patient. And at least one was an undocumented immigrant. Arce, who turns 32 in March, owed her bright career on Wall Street to fake papers bought for a few hundred dollars in a stranger’s living room in Texas. Over seven years at Goldman Sachs, she rose from intern to analyst, associate, then vice president, later becoming a director at Merrill Lynch." Max Abelson for Bloomberg.

To understand Europe's current crisis, we need to start with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the huge indemnity that France paid afterward. "The 1871-73 French indemnity is an especially useful example of a displacement [of wealth] from which we can learn a great deal about how financial crises can be generated. ... It then occurred to me that the French reparations and their impact on Europe could also tell us a great deal about the euro crisis and, more specifically, why by distorting the savings rate, wage policies in Germany in the first half of the last decade would have led almost inexorably to the balance of payments distortions that may eventually wreck the euro.' Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets.

BARRO: There's just not that much the government can do for the middle class. "The big challenge for President Obama — and for Republicans seeking their own agenda to woo the middle class — is that middle-income economic fortunes are driven mostly by private employers. The government can raise the minimum wage, but it can’t make employers raise wages for workers already making well above that. It can give out targeted tax cuts, but these can’t have large effects on the average family’s income without getting really expensive. ... This is a real contrast to the economic situation of the poor, which the Obama administration has affected greatly through policy. Between 2007 and 2012, the share of Americans who would have been poor based on their income before taxes and transfers rose by five percentage points. But after adjusting for taxes and transfers, poverty rose by just a point." The New York Times.

Another problem with the middle class is how much food it wastes. "The food discarded by consumers and retailers in just the most developed nations would be more than enough to sustain all the world’s 870 million hungry people if effective distribution methods were available. Unfortunately, most of the uneaten food goes to landfills where it decomposes and produces the dangerous greenhouse gas methane at a volume that amounts to an estimated 7 percent of the total emissions contributing to the global warming threat." The editorial board of The New York Times.

RAMPELL: Older Americans refuse to believe their medical care is a handout from the government, a poll finds. "Respondents were asked whether they personally receive a government subsidy to help them pay for health insurance. The overwhelming majority — 85 percent — said no. The age group most likely to say this? Again, those over age 65, 93 percent of whom insisted they do not receive any such subsidies. ... As estimates from the Urban Institute show, the amount retirees receive in Medicare benefits usually comes to several multiples of what they paid into the system. This is true even after accounting for inflation, Medicare premiums and the expected rate of return, had workers instead invested all the money they paid in Medicare taxes." The Washington Post.

BROWNSTEIN: Scott Walker has an early advantage among Republicans. "The new Quinnipiac University Poll put Walker, the Wisconsin governor, at 25 percent among likely participants in next year's Iowa Republican caucus. That total was nearly twice as much as the second-place finisher, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who drew 13 percent. ... But Walker's overall lead wasn't even his best news in the poll. The most encouraging result for him was that he generated consistent support across almost all of the party's central religious, class, and ideological divides. No Republican presidential candidate has demonstrated that sort of broad appeal since George W. Bush in 2000, and none of Walker's top-tier rivals in the new survey showed anything like it either." National Journal.

KRUGMAN: Greece actually got a good bargain with Europe, despite the bad press. "Greece won new flexibility for this year, and the language about future surpluses was obscure. It could mean anything or nothing. And the creditors did not pull the plug. Instead, they made financing available to carry Greece through the next few months. That is, if you like, putting Greece on a short leash, and it means that the big fight over the future is yet to come. But the Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory. ... My sense is that we’re seeing an unholy alliance here between left-leaning writers with unrealistic expectations and the business press, which likes the story of Greek debacle because that’s what is supposed to happen to uppity debtors. But there was no debacle." The New York Times

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