In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
Then, they left town.
Now, there’s no end in sight for the 42-day shutdown that has hobbled airports across the country with TSA shortages. With the House GOP’s plan going nowhere in the Senate, even Republicans acknowledge it’s not clear how to end the standoff now until there’s a breakthrough with at least some Democrats.
Both chambers of Congress are now out on a two-week recess. In a 213-203 vote, Speaker Mike Johnson and his House Republicans voted Friday night to effectively jam the Senate with their plan, fully funding DHS for eight weeks – including with border and immigration money that the prior deal left out. Three Democrats crossed party lines to vote in favor of the bill. In the meantime, Republicans say the Senate should return from its own recess to approve the plan, while President Donald Trump makes his own unilateral attempt to fund TSA without Congress’s help.
It’s a surprisingly aggressive move for the House speaker, who is directly challenging his Senate Republican counterpart, even as he sought to blame Democrats for what he called an “unconscionable” bill. Instead of the House voting on Friday to send a bill to the president’s desk, House GOP lawmakers escalated an intra-Congress feud that now scrambles any chance of reopening the department anytime soon. It’s an act of defiance by House GOP leaders, who insist they didn’t agree to Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s middle-of-the-night agreement that withheld funding for border patrol or immigration enforcement.
As they woke up Friday morning stunned by the Senate’s move, a furious Johnson and his House GOP leadership team simply refused to pass it in their chamber.
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson said Friday, though he was careful to blame Senate Democrats rather than Thune.
Later Johnson said that he still has confidence in Thune and that he spoke with him before the House Republican leaders decided to reject the Senate’s plan.
“I told him, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that we would not be able to do that,” Johnson said late Friday night, after the House vote. “We’re not going to split apart two of the most important agencies in the government and leave them hanging like that. We just couldn’t do it.”
Johnson insists that Trump is on board with the House’s plan, and that he plans to alleviate TSA’s staffing woes by paying workers directly through executive order. Privately, some GOP lawmakers and senior aides acknowledge they are pushing the party into even more treacherous political territory, with no clear plan to force Senate Democrats to accept their version of the bill and no certainty that Trump’s maneuver to unilaterally pay Transportation Security Administration employees will work either.
But others told CNN that there is so much anger within the House GOP that party leaders have no choice but to fight back against what they see as a massive win for Democrats.
“The one thing I can tell you is that there is a common disgust from our leadership team and from our members about what they did over in the Senate, and it really was not appropriate,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said Friday morning.
Johnson, asked specifically about the Senate majority leader, told reporters he “wouldn’t call John Thune the engineer of this,” and argued that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had forced the Senate-passed funding legislation onto the chamber.
But in reality, Thune and GOP staff had spent hours drafting the text of the bill, which finally passed the Senate in the early morning hours of Friday with no roll call vote or chance to debate it. (Thune’s social media account posted a defense of the plan on Friday afternoon, arguing that ICE and border patrol are already funded by the GOP’s sweeping domestic policy bill last year, and noting that Democrats “got ZERO restrictions” for ICE agents that they had sought.)
Thune and Johnson did communicate about the Senate’s path forward last night, a source familiar with the dialogue told CNN, but clearly the two men ended up on very different sides of the issue.
By Friday afternoon, the president had publicly voiced frustration with the Senate-passed bill.
“You can’t have a bill that’s not going to fund – in my opinion, you can’t have a bill that’s not going to fund ICE. You can’t have a bill that’s not going to fund any form of law enforcement, of which ICE is a big form, and so is Border Patrol,” he told Fox News.
In one display of anger at the Senate, leaders of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus announced they would not support the Senate measure, demanding that any bill include money for border patrol, as well as one of Trump’s top domestic priorities: new voter ID restrictions.
“The only thing we’re going to support is adding that funding into the bill, adding voter ID, sending it back to the Senate, make them come back in and do their work,” said Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who leads the Freedom Caucus.
And he downplayed the urgency felt by some of his GOP colleagues that airports will suffer in the meantime: “The president has already said he’s going to fund TSA out of funds he has.”
While Thune told reporters in the early morning hours of Friday that he believed the “House is aware of what we’re contemplating,” multiple senior GOP House leaders told CNN they received no warning about Thune’s plans to push through a measure that would only partially fund the department.
“I don’t even know what it is yet,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole told CNN when asked Friday morning about whether he could support the plan.
House GOP leaders did debate internally whether to pass the Senate bill. But they quickly learned that the bill could not pass under regular order, which requires a procedural vote on the floor that requires near-total unanimity among Republicans. (Some Democrats have suggested they would help with that vote, an unusual move that reflects the tight House margins and growing desire to find a funding solution.)
The other option would be Democrats helping to pass the bill under a fast-track process that requires two-thirds approval of the House, known as “suspension.” But GOP hardliners detest this route (and actually tucked a provision in House rules that prevents those kinds of votes from happening on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.)
Either route would have been messy and likely would have required arm-twisting from Trump.
Instead, Johnson and his team decided to reject the Senate plan altogether, despite some in their party increasingly worried about TSA woes increasing by the hour during a popular spring break travel season, as well as concerns about FEMA, Coast Guard operations and others.
“I mean, we’ve got to, for God’s sake, we’ve got to open this piece of government up,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey told CNN.
“We do it the hardest, most painful, most awkward, most drawn out miserable way, but eventually we get it done,” Rep. Frank Lucas told CNN. “This is a classic example of that.”
House Democrats robustly backed the Senate plan, which was similar to a partial DHS funding measure they have been pushing for weeks. Importantly for Democrats, the Senate bill does not include money for Border Patrol, which was a major sticking point in previous talks. (The Senate measure does include money for US customs operations.)
But Republicans pointed to Democratic enthusiasm for the plan and said it was exactly why they could not support it.
Now, House Republicans have passed their version of the funding bill without widespread Democratic support.
“Our position remains the same. There is a bipartisan bill that every single senator, Democrats and Republicans, supported, that has the votes to pass today,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Source: edition.cnn.com