Who's the shutdown scapegoat now? Intraparty tensions flare between House, Senate GOP after DHS snafu

WASHINGTON — As Senate Majority Leader John Thune hashed out a deal aimed at ending the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, he may have thought Democrats were its biggest threat.

Instead, his fellow Republicans across the Capitol were the ones to tank it.

Now, instead of blaming Democrats for prolonging the shutdown, GOP leadership in the House and Senate are pointing fingers at each other. And it’s deepening fissures that were already forming between them ahead of the midterm elections.

On Friday, the House passed an eight-week funding extension for the department — a direct rebuke to the Senate’s solution, passed in the wee hours of Friday morning via voice vote, to fund all of DHS for the rest of the fiscal year save Immigration and Customs Enforcement and most of Customs and Border Protection.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., dismissed the Senate measure as a “gambit” and a “joke.”

“I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill,” Johnson said. “The reason that we can’t accept this ridiculousness is because we’re not going to risk not funding the agencies that keep the American people safe.”

Johnson stopped short of publicly criticizing the South Dakota Senate majority leader, insisting Senate Democrats were the “engineers.” But Senate Republicans control which bills go to the floor, and not one Republican senator objected to the bill’s passage.

Beyond policy concerns, House members also said they were tired of the Senate jamming them. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said Friday that the Senate “didn’t talk with us” before passing the bill “at 3 in the morning when Americans are sleeping.”

“Our speaker is very unhappy. I’m not happy … what the Senate did was, frankly, not right,” Emmer said on Fox News later that day.

“I feel like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, you know, when he’s got the whole Scottish army behind him and the English and Longshanks are there on the other side. He looks off to the right, and there the lords are riding away because they’ve cut a deal with the enemy on the battlefield. So that’s disappointing,” said House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla. “That’s not the way colleagues treat one another … I do think, at the leadership level, that was inappropriate.”

One leadership aide said talks are ongoing between members, the chambers and the White House. But the disconnect between the chambers remains clear.

“So, we’ve got a dilemma,” Johnson told “Fox and Friends” on Monday. “The outrage and the reason we were so upset [is] because 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. That was the biggest issue in the 2024 election.”

Senate Republicans had an opportunity to use Monday’s pro forma session to try to clear the eight-week continuing resolution by unanimous consent. But no Republican made such a request — and it likely wouldn’t have had the backing of all senators, including Democrats, to succeed.

“We thought that [the continuing resolution] would be passed by unanimous consent on Monday and it didn’t happen in the Senate,” Johnson said.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., presided over Monday’s session, which lasted less than 60 seconds. He said the Senate sent its “bill over [to the House] because it was set up so that if some Republicans wanted to vote no, they could have voted no.”

“But ultimately, we think it would have passed,” he said.

Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle said they were perplexed by the House’s choice to pass a CR, which was never considered a viable option out of the shutdown for senators.

“The House is House-ing right now,” a Senate leadership aide quipped on Friday evening.

‘Stepping on rakes’

House GOP leadership has since redirected its shutdown rebukes back to Senate Democrats. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., posted on social media Monday reminding his followers that the shutdown is “on Schumer and Democrats.”

Thune and other Senate Republican leaders have defended their bill as a way to end the shutdown without giving in to Democratic demands. They’ve also argued that additional funding for the two immigration agencies would come through a separate budget reconciliation bill in coming weeks that avoids the risk of a Democratic filibuster.

But some House GOP members won’t let Thune off so easily.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said, “The Senate right now is just having issues with stepping on rakes left and right.”

The interchamber frustration extends beyond the current shutdown.

Rank-and-file members are growing increasingly frustrated about other policy-related issues that are brewing.

The biggest point of tension between House and Senate Republicans over the past weeks has been over the GOP’s voter ID bill dubbed the SAVE America Act. Party firebrands like Luna have criticized Thune for not passing the bill, which he doesn’t have the votes under current procedure to do.

Luna and others have urged Thune to employ a so-called talking filibuster — a procedure that could eat up months of floor time — or abolish the filibuster altogether in order to try to pass the bill with a simple majority instead of a 60-vote threshold. Thune refused, opting instead to do a pared-down extended debate on the legislation.

“The Senate is absolutely, just totally incompetent,” Luna said in an interview.

Paired with the shutdown snafu, the fights do not bode well for a united GOP legislative agenda ahead of the midterms.

“I respect the House. The House wants to be treated with respect,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told reporters earlier this month. “I do think the tension is overblown. Not saying it’s not there, but it’s overblown.”

The fight over the voter ID bill is likely to also bleed into negotiations for a second reconciliation bill in the weeks ahead as a vehicle to pass the voter ID bill. And pressure regarding the filibuster from the White House aren’t making things easier for Thune.

“It’s a shame,” President Donald Trump said Sunday of the Senate’s DHS bill. “They should really just go to a filibuster. They should terminate the filibuster and they should vote, that’s what I think.”

“I think the Senate is playing it too soft,” he continued.

With no solid solution to the shutdown in sight, it has become increasingly clear that despite controlling Congress and the White House, GOP leadership may have to ease some intraparty tension between the chambers before they can get anything done.

Meanwhile, other legislative deadlines and priorities threaten to further strain relations between the chambers, including extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Leaders hope to pass a measure before the statutory authority expires April 20.

Another issue that has received headlines is a push from House Republicans, led by Luna, to curb lawmakers’ stock trading.

“The Senate needs a serious cleaning. We can’t tolerate this type of corruption,” Luna said. “They are literally taking issues like banning insider trading, voter ID, 80-20 issues, and they are doing everything they can” to not pass them, she said.

“That is bulls--t.”

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—Nina Heller and Aris Folley contributed to this report.