GOP rift leaves Congress with no clear path to end the shutdown.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 35 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By CARL HULSE
Eight months away from elections that will decide if they keep control of Congress and preserve their governing trifecta, House and Senate Republicans have identified the enemy — and it is one another.
A meltdown in relations between the two GOP-led chambers caused the embarrassing collapse Friday of a Senate-passed proposal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security before lawmakers raced out of town on a two-week recess. It left no clear path for resolving the crisis that has led to airport chaos and workers without paychecks.
And with President Donald Trump seemingly cheering on the intraparty squabble from the White House, it also highlighted an undercurrent of tension and division coursing through Republican ranks that has burst to the surface at the least politically opportune time.
The breakdown over homeland security funding left hard-right House Republicans castigating their Senate brethren and ripping Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, in particular for cutting what they saw as an atrocious deal with Democrats in order to ease a departure for Easter break.
“Thune screwed America and left town,” Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., wrote on the social platform X. He was just one of many Republicans incensed by what they characterized as a Senate GOP sellout approved without so much as a formal vote in the middle of the night.
That was just hours after Trump told Fox News that the Senate deal was “not appropriate.”
“At three in the morning, senators just decided, well, throw in the towel and maybe see what they can cobble together to get out of town,” Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, said as the House on Friday approved its own plan to fund the entire agency for eight weeks. “That is not the responsible thing to do for this country.”
The nearly party-line vote came after House Republicans dismissed a bipartisan Senate plan to fund homeland security operations other than Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol and allow those branches to continue operating with money included last year in the party’s major tax and social policy law.
GOP leaders in the House saw that approach as surrendering to Democrats, who had refused for weeks to vote for any homeland security money without curbs on the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation crackdown, after two U.S. citizens were fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this year.
But the competing House and Senate plans meant that the shutdown would continue because neither chamber is due back until mid-April to do any business, and both have passed plans that the other refuses to take up. The Senate is set to meet in a pro forma session Monday morning, and Speaker Mike Johnson urged Republicans to try to force through the House plan then. But that would require the agreement of Democrats who have made clear they are staunchly opposed.
With their majorities at grave risk in November, Republicans would rather not spend the critical months before the elections sniping at one another in a nasty intramural spending feud, or defending the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran for that matter.
Party division can drive down voter enthusiasm and turnout. GOP lawmakers would much prefer to focus on saying how voters benefited from the tax cuts they pushed through last year or promoting a sweeping housing package they are trying to deliver to Trump’s desk — or at least training their attacks on Democrats
Instead, the housing measure is stalled amid Republican divisions, gas prices and economic worry are rising because of an unpopular Iran war, and some days GOP lawmakers appear angrier at each other than they are at Democrats.
Thune and Johnson have talked since the backlash to the Senate legislation erupted, but the majority leader has not responded publicly to the outcry. As the legislation was agreed to just before 2:30 a.m. Friday with only a handful of senators on the floor, he made it clear that it was not his preferred approach but a pragmatic way to move forward and settle the spending fight.
“It’s not the way to fund the department,” he said of the piecemeal spending on homeland security, “but we are out of time for the critical responsibilities, and tens of thousands of workers currently going without pay.”
The Republican unrest is being exacerbated by Thune’s handling of a new voter measure being pushed by Trump. The president, along with hard-right members of Congress in both chambers and activists, have urged the majority leader to keep the Senate in session and gut the filibuster if necessary to approve the bill that would put stricter requirements on identification to vote and register and new controls on voting by mail. But Thune has so far demurred and has said at some point he would end the debate if Republicans are unable to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
Given the Republican infighting, lawmakers now fear they may have to start anew in the Senate to negotiate some sort of compromise with Democrats, even though such talks failed to produce an agreement over the past two months because Democrats and the White House could not come to terms on new restraints on immigration officers.
But the GOP divisions have also sapped Democrats’ incentive for reaching a deal. Trump on Friday declared that he would go around Congress to pay Transportation Security Agency workers, potentially alleviating the airport security snarls that were a main motivator in coming up with the bipartisan Senate deal the House rejected.
Plus, Democrats have their own midterm imperatives and will be in no hurry to get into the middle of a fight between dueling Republicans.
“The bill that the Senate passed — every conservative senator and every liberal one came to a consensus that the stalemate needed to end, that TSA agents needed to be paid, and that FEMA needed to be funded,” Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., said during the House debate. “The only reason we are not considering it is because our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been captured by the far-right wing of their party. It is shameful.”