Anger at Senate GOP Reaches Fever Pitch With No DHS Deal in Sight, SAVE America Act Debate Stalled

Anger at Senate Republican leadership is reaching a fever pitch after lawmakers left town with no deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security and no path forward on the SAVE America Act. The White House says President Trump would host lawmakers for an Easter dinner if that meant they would return to Washington to work through the weekend. Senator John Thune enraged some of his colleagues last week by passing a bill by unanimous consent to fund all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol deportation operations. Speaker Mike Johnson quickly rejected it, calling the legislation a “joke.” After refusing to take up Mr. Thune’s bill, Mr. Johnson successfully passed a clean extension of DHS funding, though such a bill will not pass the Senate. In a statement Sunday, Senator Chuck Schumer’s office said he had “made clear that Democrats would not accept anything less than what was passed unanimously by the Senate.”By Monday, several lawmakers, influential conservative commentators, and the president himself began calling for the Senate to return to try to take up some kind of DHS funding bill, as well as the SAVE America Act. Both pieces of legislation are subject to the 60-vote threshold, however. “The only way out of this DHS funding mess is for the Senate to COME BACK TO DC and ELIMINATE the filibuster NOW! We already know where the Democrats stand, and it’s NOT with the American people,” Senator Rick Scott wrote on X Monday. “It’s time to FULLY FUND DHS.”During a White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Congress should return in order to put political pressure on Democrats to fund the department. She says the president cannot pay TSA agents or other DHS employees by executive order in perpetuity after he signed a memorandum last week directing the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, to do so. “The president is … encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem, and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters. “Congress should come back and they should get it done.”“He said he’ll host a big Easter dinner here at the White House if Congress will come back and fight the Democrats on this issue, which we should do,” she added. One Republican House lawmaker, Congressman John Rose, has gone a step further than some of his conservative colleagues. He says Mr. Thune ought to be removed as Senate GOP leader after passing his preferred spending bill through the chamber in the middle of the night. “Tennesseans never wait around for Washington to make up its mind — and we shouldn’t start now. The SAVE America Act is common sense, but it’s stuck in the Senate, and they left town,” Mr. Rose wrote on X after telling Newsmax that Mr. Thune should be removed. Mr. Rose reserved some ire for the Senate Republican conference more broadly, too. “Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking the Senate’s dirty DHS deal was just @LeaderJohnThune — rank-and-file Republican senators were in on it too. Any single Republican senator could have stopped the Thune/Schumer DHS deal, but not one did. Not a single one,” Mr. Rose wrote on X Sunday. “Republican senators knew leadership’s plan ahead of time, and they still left town knowing exactly what was coming.”Senator Mike Lee — the sponsor of the SAVE America Act — says Mr. Trump himself should step in by deploying a presidential power not used since 1948. “President Trump has the power to convene the Senate under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution ‘on extraordinary Occasions,’” Mr. Lee wrote on X Sunday night. “If a department with 260,000 employees (DHS) going unfunded isn’t an ‘extraordinary occasion’ — especially while the Senate is out on a two-week recess during that shutdown with no plans to resolve the impasse beyond ‘we’ll deal with that in two weeks’ — I don’t know what is.” Several members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus have also called on Mr. Thune to bring his colleagues back to town to continue negotiating a DHS funding deal. The group’s chairman, Congressman Andy Harris, along with Congressmen Andrew Clyde, Keith Self, and Andy Biggs, among others, say senators should take up the House-passed funding bill to reopen DHS at current spending levels.

Anger at Senate GOP Reaches Fever Pitch With No DHS Deal in Sight, SAVE America Act Debate Stalled

Anger at Senate GOP Reaches Fever Pitch With No DHS Deal in Sight, SAVE America Act Debate Stalled

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