Finger-pointing, profanity, even “poppycock.”

An overwhelming sense of frustration and despair has overtaken Congress as lawmakers try to clinch a deal to end a nearly six-week shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security as a previously scheduled holiday recess looms.

The funding framework Republican senators sketched out with President Donald Trump Monday now seems to be on life support, and the Senate has yet to circle a backup agreement that would end the impasse over immigration enforcement tactics responsible for the ongoing DHS shutdown that’s spurring air travel disruptions as unpaid TSA screeners stop showing up for work.

Trump has shown little interest in bringing the two sides together on a deal. At a dinner hosted by the House GOP campaign arm Wednesday, with many lawmakers in attendance, Trump blamed Democrats for, he said, backing out of DHS funding agreements with Republicans in recent weeks.

“Because they don’t want to settle,” the president said. “They want chaos.”

Underscoring the deadlock, the Senate voted for a sixth time Wednesday against advancing a package to fund all of DHS.

“It looks like everybody is going to stare at each other for a little while,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday, before nodding at lawmakers’ best hope for getting a deal — their overwhelming desire to leave town.

“You know how it is around here, it’s not Thursday yet,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to let things run.”

Bipartisan talks continued late Wednesday night after lawmakers aired rising frustrations earlier in the day that recent progress had seemingly reversed. Raw feelings replaced the optimism that sprouted up around talks between the White House and Senate Democrats that picked up before this past weekend and were further fueled by conversations between the White House and GOP lawmakers Monday.

Democrats say Republicans suddenly gave up this week on negotiating new rules for immigration enforcement agents after DHS officers fatally shot two people in Minnesota in January.

“For Republicans to now act as though Democrats have changed our position, as though we’ve moved the goalpost, is poppycock — bad faith,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech Wednesday. “And for Republicans to send a proposal that has no reforms is bad faith, as well.”

Republicans, for their part, say Democrats are unwilling to take yes for an answer — even after they proposed leaving out ICE enforcement funding.

“I don’t know how they will ever satisfy their crazy online political base,” Thune told reporters, “because that’s what this is about.”

Lawmakers in both chambers are scheduled to return home Friday for a two-week break around the Easter and Passover holidays. If Congress doesn’t act by Saturday night, the DHS funding lapse will become the longest shutdown of any federal agency in U.S. history — exceeding the 43-day government-wide shutdown that ended in November.

Thune is leaving the door open to keeping senators in Washington into, or even through, the recess. But Republicans privately expect to have attendance issues after several colleagues just skipped out on a rare weekend session to work through a partisan elections bill.

One GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, summed up their feelings: “I just want to go home.”

Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont described colleagues as “mutually fatigued,” adding that senators are “getting tired of each other.”

Thune floated the idea of calling senators back if he lets them leave and there is an agreement on DHS funding after the Senate has adjourned. But leaving town, some of his own members fear, would deep-six any chance of momentum.

“I’m struggling for an argument for us to leave unless we settle some of these things,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve got lots of plates spinning. And I am afraid if we leave until we get some certainty around them, a few of them are going to fall to the floor.”

Senate Republicans aren’t the only ones watching the clock. A group of centrist House Democrats huddled Wednesday morning with Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, the Republican chair of the Homeland Security funding panel. According to a person granted anonymity to describe the private meeting, the House lawmakers were feeling “antsy” and worried their Senate Democratic counterparts were moving too slowly.

California Rep. Adam Gray, one of the Democrats who sat down with Britt, said House lawmakers wanted to “strike a sense of urgency” among Senate negotiators and “encourage them to get on it.”

“I don’t think we can just all sit around here. The American public is increasingly frustrated,” Gray added.

It’s not just their own schedules that senators are keeping a close eye on. With the Easter holiday coming up and spring breakers traveling across the country, lawmakers are bracing for the situation at airports to further deteriorate.

The head of TSA told members of the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday that more than 480 screeners have quit since the shutdown began more than five weeks ago, calling it “a dire situation” and warning of a “perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers” ahead of World Cup games this summer.

Senate Democrats sent Republicans a counteroffer Wednesday, but it was immediately dismissed as unserious by GOP leaders.

Democrats are irked that the Republican framework does not include any of the immigration enforcement changes the two parties have been discussing since DHS agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Those shootings largely united Democratic lawmakers behind demands for new rules such as barring immigration agents from wearing masks or entering homes without judicial warrants.

“We didn’t invent this out of thin air,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the DHS funding panel, told reporters Wednesday. “They murdered two Americans in cold blood. They are behaving illegally.”

Murphy said Democrats have made considerable concessions to Republicans during the weeks of negotiations, but some Republicans said Democrats had rejected deals and abandoned another that had been outlined at the negotiating table. Under that framework, only the DHS policy constraints agreed to before the Minneapolis killings would be enacted, but funding for ICE enforcement and removal efforts would not be included.

That’s why the proposal was pitched to Trump this week, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said in an interview, in hopes of breaking the impasse.

“The whole deal had been premised on Senator Schumer and our Democratic colleagues opening everything else up besides ICE, and then we deal with ICE,” Kennedy said. “And they have backed off that.”

Riley Rogerson and Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rolled out an energy and climate change agenda Wednesday as a preview of what Democrats have in store if they take the chamber’s majority in November’s elections.

Schumer’s five-point plan seeks to ride the national momentum on affordability, framing Democrats as the party not just of clean energy and fighting climate change, but of lower electricity bills and more jobs.

It touches on some longtime Democratic priorities — like bringing back the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax incentives that President Donald Trump and Republicans rolled back last year — and easing permitting hurdles for wind, solar and other zero-emissions energy sources.

“We can bring new voters and allies into the fight for a cleaner environment by showing how clean energy is affordable energy,” Schumer said.

“With this new expanded coalition, putting us back in the majority, we have an opportunity to put forward new policy solutions, strong policy solutions, that tell the American people we can both lower costs and make real progress on climate change,” he continued.

Schumer presented the plan at the League of Conservation Voters’ annual Capital Dinner, gathering hundreds of donors, lawmakers, environmental staff and others.

The group, long a major Democratic ally, is one of the nation’s top election spenders, and is poised to be a major part of Democrats’ attempts to recover from their 2024 losses.

Clean energy, Schumer said, is “the cheapest and fastest way to add energy to the grid, and reduces our emissions at the same time.”

The Democrats’ plan seeks to build out more electricity transmission and storage, make sure data centers pay their fair share for energy, and better protect consumers from electricity bill increases.

While many of the pillars are longtime priorities on the left, Schumer emphasized some new priorities. The plan puts geothermal and nuclear energy, including fusion, on a similar level to renewables like wind and solar.

Schumer is also promising “a thorough re-examination of the entire structure and incentives within our energy systems … to prioritize lowering costs,” and new efforts to make electricity bills “easier to understand.”

While Democrats have been engaging with Republicans toward bipartisan permitting legislation for all forms of energy, Schumer presented a more partisan permitting concept in his speech.

“Democrats will provide legislative certainty for clean energy projects, so that workers and investors can rebuild the clean energy project ecosystem that Trump has destroyed,” he said, adding that permitting legislation “never, never must come at the expense of our obligation to protect local communities and safeguard the environment.”

Democrats have not been particularly vocal on climate change in their drive to take the Senate and House majorities, as they reexamine the issue’s palatability with voters. Schumer’s rollout shows at least some willingness to focus on climate, but keeps the party’s priority on affordability.

Democrats currently hold 47 of the Senate’s seats, so they would need a net gain of four seats to get the majority. The party is focusing on candidates like former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Gov. Janet Mills in Maine and former Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska to get there, but it’s an uphill battle.

The party has also taken recent steps to push its energy agenda in the Senate. Earlier Tuesday, Democrats forced a vote on a resolution that sought to undo Trump’s implementation of clean energy tax policies. More such resolutions are forthcoming.

Florida has been viewed for months as the potential capstone of a GOP redistricting campaign, but now Sunshine State Republicans are growing wary after the dramatic flip of two legislative seats in the state — including one where President Donald Trump votes.

Republicans already hold a commanding 20-8 edge over Democrats in the Florida House delegation, and some in the GOP — including Gov. Ron DeSantis — believe they could pick up as many as five more seats with a rare mid-decade redraw of district lines.

Some Florida incumbents are now warning in stark terms it could backfire.

“I think the Legislature needs to be very cognizant of the fact that if they get too aggressive … you could put incumbent members at risk,” GOP Rep. Greg Steube said. Some seats that Republicans previously won by eight or nine points, he said, could instead have only a four- or five-point GOP advantage — putting them in reach for Democrats in a wave election.

DeSantis, citing a state Supreme Court decision from last year and a potential ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, has already called a special session of the state Legislature in April to push ahead with new lines. So far there have been no official maps produced or any signs that lawmakers have started working on them.

Republican anxiety has only grown further after Democrats notched surprising wins in special elections Tuesday, including a Palm Beach County district that contains the Mar-a-Largo resort where Trump lives and votes.

While many in the GOP have brushed off the Democratic gains there and in other states as anomalies, private qualms are growing among the incumbents whose seats could be put at greater risk due to redistricting.

“We keep saying these are kind of one-off things that haven’t gone our way,” said one Florida House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But I’m not seeing any of the one-offs that are going our way.”

“To talk as aggressively as some of what we’ve heard, there’s no way to get there without significantly weakening some districts,” the member added.

House Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the opportunity. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries quickly sent a warning Tuesday night that redistricting could backfire.

“We will crush House Republicans in November if DeSantis tries to gerrymander the Florida congressional map,” Jeffries said in a post on X.

Others are openly objecting to redistricting on more high-minded grounds. Rep. Daniel Webster, a veteran Republican from central Florida, called it a “slippery slope.”

“I’ve been around enough reapportionments to know it can come back and bite you,” he said.

“I don’t like this redistricting stuff,” Jacksonville-area Rep. John Rutherford said, noting south Florida would likely bear the brunt of any changes. “But if they think they can get another two seats or something, have at it.”

Any significant redraw in Florida would likely focus on changing districts that were drawn based on racial considerations, the subject of the court rulings DeSantis has cited. While much of the focus has been on seats held by Democrats, Republicans concede it could lead to changes to the Miami-area district represented by GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Some incumbents are also worried that redistricting — still weeks away — is hindering their reelection campaigns as the midterms approach.

“Why would you knock on doors if you don’t know if those doors are gonna be in your district or not?” Steube said.

The hand-wringing over Florida comes as the fallout from Trump’s monthslong redistricting push continues to ripple through the House. Republicans kicked things off with a surprise effort to draw new maps in Texas, but Democrats countered with an effort to draw California’s lines in their favor.

After months of wrangling in about a dozen states, the whole effort looks to end up close to a wash — after some Republicans tried to warn party leaders the heavy-handed effort could backfire.

A group of House Republicans from Florida privately discussed their concerns about the fallout of yet another redistricting push in their state, several Republicans confirmed — especially amid rising anxiety that Hispanic voters could be turning away from the GOP.

House GOP leaders mostly brushed off the Florida special elections in public comments Wednesday, arguing that low-turnout, off-cycle races shouldn’t be considered midterm bellwethers. But some suggested there are lessons to be learned from Tuesday’s results.

“Surely you look at those and see, are there things we can learn and improve upon when the big election comes?” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Wednesday. “And obviously, November is the election that we are focused on.”

The top leaders of the House GOP’s campaign arm, Reps. Richard Hudson of North Carolina and Brian Jack of Georgia, both deferred to the state Legislature on redistricting in Florida Wednesday.

Hudson, the NRCC chair, said Florida’s growing population means redistricting “makes sense to do,” but he said he was more concerned about turnout and other factors.

Jack, the group’s deputy chair for recruiting, similarly talked up the candidates Republicans would be fielding in Florida and elsewhere. As for redistricting, he said, “I defer to the Legislature.”

“It’s up to them,” he said, “not up to us.”