Eight months away from elections that will decide if they keep control of Congress and preserve their governing trifecta, House and Senate Republicans have identified the enemy — and it is one another.
A meltdown in relations between the two G.O.P.-led chambers caused the embarrassing collapse on Friday of a Senate-passed proposal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security before lawmakers raced out of town on a two-week recess. It left no clear path for resolving the crisis that has led to airport chaos and workers without paychecks.
And with President Trump seemingly cheering on the intraparty squabble from the White House, it also highlighted an undercurrent of tension and division coursing through Republican ranks that has burst to the surface at the least politically opportune time.
The breakdown over homeland security funding left hard-right House Republicans castigating their Senate brethren and ripping Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, in particular for cutting what they saw as an atrocious deal with Democrats in order to ease a departure for Easter break.
“Thune screwed America and left town,” Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on the social media platform X. He was just one of many Republicans incensed by what they characterized as a Senate G.O.P. sellout approved without so much as a formal vote in the middle of the night.
That was just hours after Mr. Trump told Fox News that the Senate deal was “not appropriate.”
“At three in the morning, senators just decided, well, throw in the towel and maybe see what they can cobble together to get out of town,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, said as the House on Friday approved its own plan to fund the entire agency for eight weeks. “That is not the responsible thing to do for this country.”
The nearly party-line vote came after House Republicans dismissed a bipartisan Senate plan to fund homeland security operations other than Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol and allow those branches to continue operating with money included last year in the party’s major tax and social policy law.
G.O.P. leaders in the House saw that approach as surrendering to Democrats, who had refused for weeks to vote for any homeland security money without curbs on the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation crackdown, after two American citizens were fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
But the competing House and Senate plans meant that the shutdown would continue because neither chamber is due back until mid-April to do any business, and both have passed plans that the other refuses to take up. The Senate is set to meet in a pro forma session on Monday morning, and Speaker Mike Johnson urged Republicans to try to force through the House plan then. But that would require the agreement of Democrats who have made clear they are staunchly opposed.
With their majorities at grave risk in November, Republicans would rather not spend the critical months before the elections sniping at one another in a nasty intramural spending feud, or defending the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran for that matter.
Party division can drive down voter enthusiasm and turnout. G.O.P. lawmakers would much prefer to focus on saying how voters benefited from the tax cuts they pushed through last year or promoting a sweeping housing package they are trying to deliver to Mr. Trump’s desk — or at least training their attacks on Democrats
Instead, the housing measure is stalled amid Republican divisions, gas prices and economic worry are rising because of an unpopular Iran war, and some days G.O.P. lawmakers appear angrier at each other than they are at Democrats.
Some Republicans did try to aim their fire over the spending fight on Democrats. Mr. Johnson made them out to be the true culprits, arguing that they had somehow foisted the Senate deal on unwitting Republicans who were hoodwinked by Democrats in the dead of night. But even that misleading characterization carried a subtext of criticism of his own party.
“I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill,” Mr. Johnson told reporters as he waved a printout of part of the deal in the air derisively.
In fact, majority Republicans dictate what happens in the Senate. Every Senate Republican was given an opportunity to review the spending deal. It could have been blocked by the objection of a single member. None was made.
That left House Republicans sputtering with rage as several of them complained that they had not received so much as a courtesy phone call from their Senate counterparts letting them know that such a deal was in the offing.
Mr. Thune and Mr. Johnson have talked since the backlash to the Senate legislation erupted, but the majority leader has not responded publicly to the outcry. As the legislation was agreed to just before 2:30 a.m. Friday with only a handful of senators on the floor, he made it clear that it was not his preferred approach but a pragmatic way to move forward and settle the spending fight.
“It’s not the way to fund the department,” he said of the piecemeal spending on homeland security, “but we are out of time for the critical responsibilities, and tens of thousands of workers currently going without pay.”
The Republican unrest is being exacerbated by Mr. Thune’s handling of a new voter measure being pushed by Mr. Trump. The president, along with hard-right members of Congress in both chambers and activists, have urged the majority leader to keep the Senate in session and gut the filibuster if necessary to approve the bill that would put stricter requirements on identification to vote and register and new controls on voting by mail. But Mr. Thune has so far demurred and has said at some point he would end the debate if Republicans are unable to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
That stance has compounded Republican ire at him and sparked new demands for the Senate to get back to work. Appearing on the Fox News program “Saturday in America,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and a chief proponent of the elections bill, called on the Senate to reconvene immediately to consider homeland security funding and the election bill, even if it meant an interruption in the recess.
“If you don’t want to take grueling votes at difficult hours and sometimes have to work longer than you want to, maybe you shouldn’t become a United States senator,” Mr. Lee said.
Given the Republican infighting, lawmakers now fear they may have to start anew in the Senate to negotiate some sort of compromise with Democrats, even though such talks failed to produce an agreement over the past two months because Democrats and the White House could not come to terms on new restraints on immigration officers.
But the G.O.P. divisions have also sapped Democrats’ incentive for reaching a deal. Mr. Trump on Friday declared that he would go around Congress to pay Transportation Security Agency workers, potentially alleviating the airport security snarls that were a main motivator in coming up with the bipartisan Senate deal the House rejected.
Plus, Democrats have their own midterm imperatives and will be in no hurry to get into the middle of a fight between dueling Republicans.
“The bill that the Senate passed — every conservative senator and every liberal one came to a consensus that the stalemate needed to end, that T.S.A. agents needed to be paid, and that FEMA needed to be funded,” Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, said during the House debate. “The only reason we are not considering it is because our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been captured by the far-right wing of their party. It is shameful.”
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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