Frustration mounts as GOP infighting derails House

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Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with the infighting that has brought work in the House to a halt and caused Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to send lawmakers home early for the second week in a row.

Republican rebels are fuming over a voter ID bill and what they say is a broken promise from leadership to vote on border legislation by Independence Day.

But those defectors are getting increasing heat from not only their colleagues, but from the president whose policies they claim to be fighting for.

While hosting a group of Republican lawmakers for dinner Tuesday evening at the “Rose Garden Club” at the White House, President Trump turned to Johnson and asked if it was members of the House Freedom Caucus who tanked a procedural vote that would have teed up major funding and defense legislation.

Johnson, according to a source at the dinner, responded to Trump that some of the 13 lawmakers who voted down the rule were in the Freedom Caucus. Trump said that was “stupid” and that Republicans should stick together like the Democrats.

Trump dubbed the rebels part of the “3 o’clock caucus” in an apparent reference to the kind of members he gets asked to call in the wee hours of the morning to help sway them on a vote, as he has previously publicly complained about. Trump said there were nine members of the 3 o’clock caucus, but he didn’t specify who the nine were, the source said. Punchbowl News first reported Trump’s remark at the dinner.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who is not a Freedom Caucus member, was the most visible of the 13 rebels this week. She had called for the annual defense authorization bill to include her amendment attaching the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, legislation pushed by Trump that would require voter ID to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship for voter registration. It has passed the House multiple times.

Johnson had tried to use a different procedure to merge the SAVE America Act with the must-pass defense bill, but Luna insisted that it would be easier for the Senate to strip it out, and voted against the procedural rule. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has repeatedly said there is not the support necessary to upend Senate traditions and muscle the bill through his chamber.

Luna mounted her stand for the SAVE America Act despite Trump last week calling on Republicans to stop “grandstanding” by voting down rules and to unify. But she does not see herself in conflict with the president.

“I think that we are exactly in lockstep with the president, and I share his same frustrations,” Luna said Monday.

That hard-line stance, however, is enraging colleagues who see it as counterproductive and ineffective.

“It’s dumb to shutdown the House to pressure the Senate. Low IQ strategists,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told The Hill in a text message.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, argued to his colleagues in a House GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning that holding up the work of the House only turns the chamber into the Senate, according to a GOP lawmaker.

Johnson publicly vented his frustrations over the issue after the failed rule vote, too.

“It makes no sense for us to stop our very important progress forward from House Republicans, because some Senate Democrats are refusing to do their job,” Johnson said.

The SAVE America Act, however, was not the only dominant issues for most of the 13 members who voted against the rule.

Several Freedom Caucus members who voted against the rule said they were angry about Republican leadership earlier in the month not holding to a commitment to bring up legislation to codify Trump’s border policies by around Independence Day. That deal was made as a way to get the members’ votes on a bill funding immigration enforcement and Border Patrol — but leaders did not have any border bill on the schedule for this week.

“You can’t just keep moving things along without dealing with those important issues, and that was what we were, you know, told several weeks ago, and it didn’t happen,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said.

“We need to be on offense, and we’re not,” Roy continued. “We ought to be codifying what the president’s doing.”

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and some other lawmakers, meanwhile, appeared to vote against the rule out of anger about an amendment not being approved to restore terminated pensions for workers at the former General Motors auto parts company Delphi. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said he voted against the rule for yet another unrelated issue in the defense bill, which he declined to elaborate on.

“I was gonna behave and be a good girl and vote for it, but it was going down anyway. May as well play,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told Punchbowl News.

House chaos has been commonplace in the razor-thin majority, and GOP leaders in the past have held open votes for hours and convened late-night meetings with rebels to work through tense issues. But this time around, leaders are taking a different tactic by sending the chamber home.

Some of the hard-liners would have preferred to stay to work out the issues. But their critics say that the rebels have only themselves to blame.

“They’ve handed Jeffries a win when he was having a bad week with socialists winning Dem primaries. Luna and Roy are handing Jeffries big victories here and giving Democrats challengers great talking points for their campaigns,” Bacon said, referring to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).

Democrats are not shy about calling out the chaos.

“It affects business tremendously,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said. “There’s a lot of keeping the wheels on that Congress does, whether it’s reauthorizing programs on basic healthcare, rural healthcare, mental health, whether it’s trying to provide continual funding for energy sources, things just basic things like postal service, things that are actually quite mundane, but very necessary to maintain, happens all the time here, and when you ground the house to a halt over some maximalist demands that you don’t have the votes for.”

But Rep. Kevin Kiley (Calif.), an Independent who caucuses with Republicans, said that Democrats share some blame, too.

“I’m frustrated with people who are stopping the legislative process,” Kiley said. “But there’s also no reason why every single Democrat needs to vote no on these things. They could vote yes. They don’t need to team up with people who are stalling the legislative process.”

The latest upheaval agenda threatens to melt the party’s hopes of passing any more significant party-line legislation before a tough midterm election cycle.

Top Republicans had said they wanted to pass a third reconciliation bill with Pentagon funding, anti-fraud measures, and a grant program for states if they implement SAVE America Act-like voting reforms. But with the House scheduled to be in session for just two more weeks before the long August recess, it is extremely unlikely that the chamber will pass such legislation by the end of July, as top Republicans had hoped.

Johnson on Tuesday dismissed a question about whether he has lost control of the House GOP.

“We have full control of the conference,” Johnson said. “People get very emotional about things, and sometimes they make irrational decisions.”

Sudiksha Kochi contributed.

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