House infighting is threatening to sink the GOP agenda on Capitol Hill. Now Republicans are hoping their most effective whip — President Donald Trump — is ready to come off the sidelines.
The push for the White House to take a more active role comes as the GOP finds itself stalemated on several fronts with no sign that they will be able to navigate a way forward without Trump’s direct intervention.
The House floor was effectively closed for business Tuesday as days of internal negotiations failed to produce a deal among competing GOP factions, allowing Speaker Mike Johnson to extend a soon-to-expire surveillance law or pass the much-anticipated farm bill.
Meanwhile, there’s growing frustration among Senate Republicans and Trump allies that the House hasn’t yet taken up their bill funding most of the Department of Homeland Security after Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Instead, in a bid to satisfy his own members, Johnson wants to make small changes to the bill, which would further drag out the partial shutdown that is already on day 74.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who is careful to avoid telling the House what to do, was uncharacteristically direct Tuesday with his frustration over the other chamber’s refusal to pass a DHS bill senators have already twice passed unanimously. He suggested Trump needed to intervene.
“We’re trying as best we can to coordinate strategy with the House, but … it’s going to take, obviously, I think the involvement of the White House to bust some of these things loose,” Thune said.
He said to House Republicans who are still criticizing the Senate’s plan, “I guess my question is, what was the alternative? That’s what I said to them at the time. I mean, tell me, give me a better option.”
Republicans on the House Rules Committee agreed Tuesday night to tee up the votes on the spy-powers extension and the farm bill, among other measures, but there’s no guarantee the rest of the House GOP will fall in line Wednesday on the floor.
Trump hasn’t been completely on the sidelines as the House has floundered. He sent a Truth Social message Monday encouraging the House to support a separate budget plan aimed at providing immigration enforcement funding — part of a two-track plan to end the shutdown. His budget office issued a memo Tuesday evening urging support of the Senate-passed legislation funding the rest of the department, which could run out of money to pass employees as soon as next week.
Separately, White House deputies tried earlier this month to pressure House GOP hard-liners to back down in the fight over extending a spy law targeting foreigners abroad known as Section 702.
What’s missing in the minds of some Republican lawmakers is the type of sustained, one-on-one arm-twisting that Trump deployed on House Republicans last year on several occasions — including to push through the GOP’s tax-cuts-focused megabill and to get Johnson elected speaker.
Trump has instead been focused in recent days on the state visit from King Charles III of the United Kingdom, not to mention the military campaign in Iran he launched two months ago alongside Israel.
“Mike’s clearly having to wrestle with his House members, and it’s not his fault,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “He’s good, but he can’t work miracles. And I think the president’s going to have to step in.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Thune’s call for more presidential involvement on Capitol Hill.
One House Republican, who has been in touch with Trump officials and was granted anonymity to describe behind-the-scenes conversations, said the White House wants “DHS fixed this week.” But so far Trump’s arm’s-length overtures haven’t worked with House hard-liners who want to expand the scope of the party-line immigration enforcement bill to encompass other conservative priorities.
Johnson has taken steps to assuage the holdouts. He has offered to attach a key hard-right priority — a permanent ban on the creation of a government-sponsored digital currency — to the spy-law extension before sending it to the Senate. The speaker is separately seeking to appease a group of farm-state members by attaching a year-round ethanol fuel measure to the bill authorizing agriculture programs.
Thune, in an interview, shot down the idea that a Section 702 renewal with a digital currency ban attached could pass the Senate, calling it a “bad idea” that is “not happening.”
Underscoring Johnson’s dilemma, the comments sparked a public rebuke from one of the conservative hard-liners, Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison, who said, “I don’t care what Thune thinks.”
Plenty of Republicans — both centrists and conservatives — are growing frustrated that Johnson isn’t just putting the Senate-approved DHS funding bill, the other part of the party’s two-part plan, on the floor. The bill includes funding for Secret Service paychecks, among other key security-related matters.“This is batshit,” another House Republican said about Johnson’s plan to push through several other bills this week but not yet the DHS fix.
House GOP leaders want to put a reworked DHS funding bill on the House floor Thursday — but only after they clear the separate budget resolution Wednesday.
Scores of conservatives have threatened to tank the Senate-passed bill unless the speaker strips out language that explicitly zeroes out funding for agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But many Republicans believe those holdouts would quickly cave — and end the record-long DHS shutdown — if Trump would simply apply some pressure.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said in an interview Trump should get more personally involved in pushing House Republicans on both the DHS legislation and the surveillance bill. Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), meanwhile, said in a statement it was “absurd” DHS was still shut down and that it is “beyond time to open the government.”
Thune said Tuesday he also believed House Republicans should “just pass the bill” as GOP leaders discussed whether they could “massage” the contentious ICE funding language to the hard-liners’ liking without threatening its rapid passage in the Senate.
According to two administration officials and a person close to the White House who were granted anonymity to candidly describe the situation, there is little optimism inside DHS that the shutdown will end quickly.
“That is really leading people to question why we even do [our jobs] anymore if Congress can’t do their jobs,” one of the administration officials said.
Within DHS, the feeling is “we all know what the end result is going to be, so just do it — make it happen,” the person close to the White House said. “Instead it continues to drag on and drag on.”