Republicans in the House and Senate splintered this week as the party squabbled over its strategy on handling the partial government shutdown and then sent members home for a two-week recess without solving the deadlock.
In interviews, GOP senators publicly disparaged their own party’s strategy even as they refrained from lobbing personal attacks at individual Republicans by name. The scale of the grumbling indicates that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson are under increasing pressure to bring lawmakers back to D.C. to break the logjam.
Thune faces some of the loudest opposition from his own side at any point since Trump took office last year.
On Tuesday, one of the Republican senators pressing the majority leader was Sen. Mike Lee, a Trump loyalist and one of the chamber’s more conservative voices. In numerous tweets over Monday and Tuesday, the Utah senator wrote that Thune should call lawmakers back to Washington to reach a deal on DHS as well as the SAVE America Act, a piece of voter ID legislation that has become Donald Trump’s priority ahead of the midterms.
But Conservatives in the Senate don’t just want DHS funding to pass — they want to see the filibuster scrapped or altered to deliver Republicans another victory, one that they hope will have significant effects on elections this year. “The Senate should convene and remain in session until it has (1) fully funded DHS and (2) passed the SAVE America Act,” Lee posted Tuesday afternoon.
He’s far from the only senator breathing down Thune’s neck on it. Other members of the Republican caucus including Tommy Tuberville and Rick Scott echoed calls for the chamber to return, with Scott writing Tuesday afternoon: “This can’t happen if we’re on recess AND have a filibuster standing in the way. BRING THE SENATE BACK and BLOW UP the filibuster!”
In the lower chamber, Thune’s search for allies isn’t going much better.
The two top Republicans in the House took turns battering the Senate (and Thune, without naming him) for the chamber’s decision to go forward with a two-week recess without a deal being made. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise took turns bashing the senate for a late-night vote that the pair said was already resulting in “buyer’s remorse” among their colleagues.
In a Fox and Friends interview Tuesday the speaker described being “outraged” at the Senate proposal: “They sent us a bill that literally put the number zero in the bill for the funding of border security and Customs and Immigration Enforcement. We can’t do that.”
“The Senate has to do their job and help us on this heavy lift,” Johnson added. “We have to get the government funded, and they’re playing games with real people’s lives.”
Scalise, his top deputy, said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday that the ball was firmly in Thune’s court.
“The House stayed later than we were scheduled to stay to take up a bill to fully fund the department, and sent it back over to the Senate,” Scalise said. “The bill is over in the Senate. The Senate’s got options. They’ve got to come back and deal with it.”
The Independent reached out to Thune’s office for a response to Johnson’s remarks on Tuesday, but did not receive one.
White House officials aren’t giving the Senate any political cover, either.
“They’re on vacation right now while tens of thousands of DHS employees aren’t being paid,” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, adding that he hoped the president called lawmakers back to D.C.
Growing discord amongst Republicans in the two congressional conferences is a sign of the party’s midterm prospects, which continue to sour as the shutdown drags on and Donald Trump’s war with Iran remains unpopular with voters, who have now seen gas prices jump by more than a dollar per gallon nationally and remain at that elevated rate for weeks.
Republicans’ disadvantage on generic ballot polls continues to climb as the party is confronted by a visible economic hardship for millions of Americans while it struggles to keep TSA workers on the job, thus preventing a potential collapse of American air travel.
While the administration has announced plans to redistribute funds to keep TSA workers receiving paychecks, Democrats have warned that this may be illegal and subject to being halted by a federal judge. Call-out rates were climbing steadily among TSA workers at major airports before Donald Trump’s announcement, and TSA officials warned that some airports could be forced to shutter temporarily if adequate security personnel can’t be on scene.
For Congress, the issue is beginning to really hit home as the typically celebrity-focused paparazzi masters at TMZ have begun training their fire not on A-listers but S- and H-listers — members of the House and Senate who are enjoying personal vacations or other excursions during the shutdown. The not-so-subtle line of TMZ’s reporting has been aiming at heaping shame on members of Congress who skipped town while federal workers go unpaid.
Sen. Lindsey Graham was caught by the outlet in images at Disney World, while Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democratic House member, was spotted by TMZ’s reporters at a casino in Las Vegas.
