This week is already unraveling for House Republicans. And it’s only Tuesday.
1) House Republicans recessed the Rules Committee on Monday night without a path forward on extending FISA Section 702 authority, which lapses on Thursday. GOP leaders haven’t been able to resolve the same complaints from conservatives they’ve heard for weeks now, threatening what the White House and U.S. intelligence officials call a vital surveillance tool.
2) Speaker Mike Johnson wants to change the Senate-passed bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, another twist in the now 73-day shutdown. DHS needs funding by April 30 to continue paying its 270,000 employees, who are currently receiving their salaries under two executive orders from President Donald Trump.
3) Trump is urging House Republicans to adopt the Senate-approved budget resolution that tees up ICE and Border Patrol funding, despite widespread concern that it’s silent on other GOP priorities.
4) House members are now fighting over various provisions in the farm bill, which was supposed to be the easiest legislation of the week.
All together, this paints a multifront picture of chaos for Johnson and other top House Republicans. It puts new pressure on the Senate. And time is running short before next week’s recess.
“They’re clearly not talking to their members,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), top Rules Committee Democrat, said shortly before midnight on Monday as Republicans failed to pass a rule to extend FISA. “They have no clue on strategy or how to move anything across the finish line, and it’s just frustrating as hell.”
FISA. Johnson and House Republicans made modest tweaks to the FISA renewal proposal that failed just over a week ago. But GOP leaders won’t agree to warrant requirements for Section 702 inquiries involving a U.S. person, a key concession sought by conservatives.
The House Rules Committee recessed and never came back Monday night as Republican leaders struggled to find a path forward amid the conservative dissent. The panel may return as soon as 7:30 a.m. this morning.
“They keep coming back with the same stuff,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) complained of House GOP leaders.
“Still no warrants, still no CBDC, still no penalties to amount to anything. We’re kind of back to square one,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) added.
House Democratic leaders were working Monday to prevent any Democrats from voting for any FISA rule, citing the need for additional safeguards to rein in the Trump administration. This comes after four moderate Democrats voted yes last week on Johnson’s failed FISA renewal attempt.
“Don’t enable their incompetence,” McGovern said of his message to fellow Democrats.
Johnson told House Republicans that if they can’t come together on FISA, the Senate would move a bill first and the House may be forced to eat it.
The Senate is scheduled to hold a procedural vote today on a three-year clean FISA Section 702 extension. This is the backup option that Senate Majority Leader John Thune teed up following the House’s initial FISA debacle.
Johnson could also move another short-term extension to avoid a program shutdown. But it’s becoming more and more clear that House Republican leaders simply don’t have the aptitude or ability to come up with a compromise bill. So a short-term extension to buy more time may not be worth it.
DHS. Nearly a month ago, Johnson and Thune said Congress would fund DHS “in the coming days.” Yet Johnson still hasn’t put the Senate-passed bill on the floor, which would fund DHS apart from ICE and Border Patrol. Republicans will try to fund those two agencies through the reconciliation process.
Now, Johnson is trying to rework language in the Senate version that zeroed out accounts for ICE and Border Patrol. House Republicans are worried about the optics of voting for this.
It’s not clear yet if this is a technical correction — a small tweak in the bill — or a major change. If House Republicans jam it through, this could all come off the rails in the Senate, where Democrats would need to consent to quick passage of any amended bill.
“This has got to be just a straight-up technical thing, otherwise it gets into other areas or they add stuff to it and it becomes a real problem,” Thune said.
Thune has been frustrated with Johnson’s refusal to pass the unanimously-approved Senate DHS funding bill, saying Monday it was “drafted with our folks who have been doing this for a long time in a certain way.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to comment Monday on how Democrats would approach the issue. But the GOP food fight is creating few political incentives for Democrats to throw them a lifeline.
Yet the DHS shutdown is approaching a crisis — again. The White House is likely to say that Congress needs to pass a DHS funding bill before leaving town at the end of this week.
Tied up in all of this is the budget resolution that would allow for another reconciliation package, which House leaders see as a prerequisite to passing the Senate’s DHS bill. The House GOP whip team surveyed the conference Monday evening on the budget resolution and it wasn’t clear that the measure had the support to pass.
Farm bill. Even the farm bill — which was supposed to be the easiest lift of the week — is running into trouble. The GOP has a problem with a provision in the bill dealing with pesticide labeling.
Plus, midwestern and oil-and-gas state lawmakers have reignited their fight over the year-round sale of E15. This was a problem that House Republicans were supposed to fix months ago.
The farm bill is perhaps the one bill that could wait for consideration until after the May recess.
