House GOP erupts over Senate’s overnight move to fund pieces of DHS

By Sarah Ferris, Annie Grayer, Lauren Fox, CNN

(CNN) — Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t agree to go along with the late-night decision across the US Capitol in which Senate Majority Leader John Thune agreed to reopen the Department of Homeland Security without funds for immigration and border enforcement.

Now, a furious Johnson and his House GOP leadership team are refusing to pass it in their chamber, prolonging the department shutdown with no solution in sight.

Johnson and his House Republicans plan to vote “as soon as possible” on their own proposal to fully fund the department for eight weeks – with that border and immigration money intact. 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 end the near-record DHS shutdown, lawmakers are now planning a weekend session that scrambles any chance of reopening the department anytime soon.

“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson said Friday of the Senate’s move, though he was careful to blame Senate Democrats rather than Thune.

Johnson insists that President Donald 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 iwth 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 have not made formal statements about the measure but multiple people close to leadership believe the majority of the caucus would have ultimately supported the plan. 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 will have to pass 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.

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CNN’s Aileen Graef, Veronica Stracqualursi, Ted Barrett and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.