Tonight at 8 p.m. is the deadline for Iranian officials to cut a deal with President Donald Trump to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has said that if there’s no deal, he’d “blow up the whole country,” including ordering attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and energy production facilities.
It seems like Trump wants a deal, and it behooves him to get one. For its part, Iran continued attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia into Tuesday, although Iranian officials suggested there were positive signs coming out of Pakistani-led peace talks. There’s no deal yet, however. World financial markets are steady, although the price of oil keeps rising.
On the House GOP. The House Republican Conference is quiet right now with members out on recess. The Department of Homeland Security shutdown is now in Day 52.
The House returns April 14, and the GOP leadership isn’t going to bring up the DHS funding bill that the Senate sent back across the Capitol last week.
Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican leadership team will wait until there’s some progress on a GOP reconciliation push before they schedule a vote on the bill to fund nearly all of DHS, except for ICE and border patrol.
There is a healthy amount of anger at Johnson among his rank-and-file members right now. This morning, we want to explore whether that furor is fair, and what the speaker can and likely will do to get out of it.
The backdrop. One of the cardinal sins of being a congressional leader is guiding your membership into a box canyon with no way out — and then immediately reversing course.
That’s what House Republicans feel that Johnson did when he said that the GOP-controlled Senate’s original DHS funding bill — passed by unanimous consent — was a “joke” and the product of some nefarious plot hatched by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
In response to the Senate’s action, Johnson had House Republicans pass a 60-day stopgap funding bill for DHS, which rank-and-file GOP lawmakers immediately demanded the Senate accept. Then House members went home for this two-week recess.
With the chamber out of session, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Johnson got on the same page and issued a joint statement saying that the Senate’s DHS bill — the very one that the speaker dumped on — was the answer to ending the funding impasse.
Johnson felt like Thune left him twisting in the wind, and now Johnson has to deal with the blowback.
What Johnson did, unintentionally his allies say, was have his House Republican Conference stick their necks out for a negotiating position that he immediately abandoned.
It was always clear that Senate Democrats weren’t going to allow the passage of a 60-day DHS funding bill since they rejected similar measures a number of times during the preceding weeks. The Senate is also unwilling to end the filibuster. So Senate Republicans’ only choice was to pass a bill that Democrats would support.
It doesn’t take the second coming of Henry Clay to see that Johnson’s negotiating position was extraordinarily weak in this case. When we ran the headline “House GOP leadership decides to continue DHS shutdown” immediately after the GOP leadership rejected the Senate’s bill, the speaker’s leadership team was up in arms. But it was the only way to assess the situation.
Johnson’s allies say that they reacted how they did because Senate Republicans folded.
“My question for everybody who doesn’t like what we did is give me a better idea,” Thune countered.
The fallout. The House Republican Conference is given to rash, nasty infighting and recriminations. House Republicans had a nearly three-hour conference call on Friday. There was plenty of bellyaching about the leadership’s strategy and the Senate’s alleged weakness.
Even some of the GOP leadership’s closest allies say they’re furious with Johnson for what they see as a bait-and-switch tactic on the DHS bill. The Main Street Caucus’ text chain was lighting up with frustration.
But let’s say this: We don’t think that House Republicans are going to try to dump Johnson. He has the seemingly unshakable support of Trump. His committee chairs support him. There’s a razor-thin GOP majority. Plus, Johnson is raising a ton of money. Do House Republicans really think it wise to dump their speaker 210 days before the midterm elections when their poll numbers are in the dumps? Come on.
Senate GOP leaders are fuming at the situation too. Thune has answered the critics of his approach with “show me a better option.”
The deeper frustration for Senate Republicans is that they feel like they worked hard to frame the shutdown around Democrats’ refusal to support immigration enforcement, only to have House Republicans choose to prolong the impasse.
Some Senate Republicans are also griping privately that Trump’s executive order to pay DHS employees gave Johnson a longer runway to hold out, even though that was intended as a temporary patch. They see it as being in Trump’s interest for the shutdown to end, although the president isn’t acting like it.
The future. Johnson will return to the ongoing DHS mess, with reconciliation on top of that. And then there’s the unpopular Iran war.
Section 702 of FISA expires in two weeks. There’s been significant discontent among House Republicans that the renewal doesn’t include warrant requirements for foreign wiretapping.
Johnson called off consideration of the FISA extension before the recess. Can Johnson jam through a clean extension next week — like he says he’ll do — with all the discontent in GOP ranks? A clean extension would pass with a cross section of House Republicans and Democrats. Does Johnson have to give hardliners amendment votes? There’s a lot at stake here.
