They’ve known for months that Congress would face a late February deadline to keep the Department of Homeland Security running.
Yet the top Republican leaders in Congress — House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — haven’t talked to each other for two weeks.
That revelation on Wednesday marks the clearest sign yet that Congress will likely let the agency run out of money at the end of the day on Friday.
Both chambers of Congress are controlled by Republicans for the first time in nearly a decade, a fact that the new GOP majority hoped would unify their party.
But instead of working together to clear one of the first major legislative hurdles of the new Congress, McConnell and Boehner have left communications to their staffs, Republican sources tell CNN, and are effectively pointing at each other to come up with an end game.
“I’m waiting for the Senate to act. The House has done its job to fund DHS and to stop the president’s overreach on immigration and we are waiting for the Senate to do their jobs,” Boehner told reporters Wednesday after meeting with House Republicans, adding until the Senate acts “we are in a wait and see mode.”
McConnell’s announcement Tuesday that he would do what Democrats have urged and bring up legislation without any provisions to block the President’s executive actions on immigration made House Republicans seethe. And now Boehner is left facing yet another pivotal moment that could put his speakership on the line.
If Boehner allows a vote on a clean bill he would inflame those on the right in his party, as well as outside conservative groups who have zeroed in on this bill as the place to wage the fight on immigration. If he fails to approve funding for the agency he will be blamed for another government shutdown.
For now House GOP members are pleased Boehner is trying to pressure on the Senate. But many conservatives are outwardly hostile toward McConnell, who they believe is undermining the party’s pledge to oppose the president for going around Congress.
“The voters believed that in November Harry Reid was going to be dethroned and that the Senate was going to be controlled by Republicans. I’m sad that hasn’t happened,” Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon said, referring to the top Democrats in the Senate.
Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks said fellow Republicans equated McConnell’s move to “surrender.”
“There is no way on God’s green earth that I am going to fund illegal conduct,” Brooks said, insisting that the House-passed bill that tied DHS money with provisions to roll back the President’s immigration’s policies was the only acceptable plan.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who heads a group of House conservatives, reiterated he and his colleagues were standing firm.
“No one wants a shutdown — we’ve said that time and time again,” Jordan said, “but we also took an oath to uphold the Constitution and we know in our hearts this is unconstitutional.”
A few moderate House Republicans have said they could accept a clean spending bill, but multiple members told CNN after Wednesday’s meeting that the majority of GOP members would oppose that proposal if it came up.
The Senate could vote on that clean funding bill as soon as Wednesday, according to a senior Senate Republican source, but leaders were still working out the details. Senate Democrats were scheduled to huddle on next steps mid -day.
McConnell pressed Senate Democrats to move forward with his plan to take up both a clean funding bill and then a separate measure that blocks the President’s executive actions.
“The dual-pronged approach I’ve outlined — allowing the Senate to stop ‘unwise and unfair’ overreach on the one hand, and to fund DHS through the fiscal year on the other — is a sensible way forward,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Wednesday,
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has been a regular public presence, warning about the impact for his agency of a shutdown. He’s also continuing to make the rounds on Capitol Hill, appealing to members to find a way out before the deadline at midnight on Friday.