Congress

‘I just want to go home’: Despair settles over the Capitol as DHS deal hopes evaporate

Published

6 months ago

March 26, 2026

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.

Congress

Trump nominates Wesley Hunt as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia

Published

2 hours ago

September 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump nominated Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) to be the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia on Monday, part of a spate of nominations sent to the Senate less than two months before the midterms decides the fate of the GOP’s control of the chamber.

Hunt, one of the first Black Republicans to represent Texas in the House, was one of three Republican candidates locked in a fierce battle for a Senate seat in Texas earlier this year.

Trump held off on endorsing a candidate in the initial primary but backed state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the runoff. Hunt pitched himself as a staunch Trump ally in that race and quickly endorsed Paxton — the eventual winner — once Trump signaled his favorite.

The ambassadorship was last held by Michael Ratney, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden and served in the position until January 2025.

Trump has long made relations with Saudi Arabia a priority, welcoming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House in 2025 and striking deals with the kingdom. But the nomination comes as tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthis has reignited and the war in Iran has caused disruptions in its ability to export oil.

The other 40 nominations sent Monday to the Senate include some that Trump had previously announced on social media, including Heidi Overton as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Hung Cao as the next Navy secretary.

Congress

Hakeem Jeffries: Congress must act ‘immediately’ to rein in AI

Published

2 hours ago

September 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Monday for immediate congressional action to regulate artificial intelligence — his most urgent call to date for guardrails on the rapidly advancing technology amid warnings it could eradicate humanity if left unchecked.

“The explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the challenges that are therein presented — that’s not a hoax,” Jeffries said at his weekly news conference. “It’s very real, despite what Donald Trump has to say about that issue as well, and it requires decisive congressional action immediately, in a manner consistent with what some of the leading AI voices in the country are now saying needs to happen, as it relates to slowing things down to protect the health, the safety and the well-being of the American people.”

Jeffries’ call for regulation comes days after an ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warned that AI could “kill us all,” prompting calls from the company’s CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk for an AI development slowdown. Trump has responded by downplaying the risks and doubling down in his support for accelerating AI breakthroughs to compete with China.

Jeffries urged Speaker Mike Johnson Monday to keep Congress in session “until something is done decisively to protect the safety and the well-being of the American people, in the face of growing concerns being raised by experts within the artificial intelligence industry itself.”

Johnson canceled the last two weeks of session before the midterms, meaning that the House is slated to leave Capitol Hill on Thursday and not return until Nov. 9. The speaker has given no indication he will revisit this plan and has remained noncommittal on whether the chamber will consider AI safety legislation ahead of the elections, if at all.

Jeffries also said the Democrat-only AI commission he convened this Congress could begin rolling out its policy recommendations soon, noting he plans to meet with the group’s three co-chairs this week. And he blamed Johnson for declining to reconstitute a bipartisan AI task force that would have allowed members of both parties to work together on the issue.

“We want to ensure that American entrepreneurs and companies can continue to lead in this space and not be overcome by the Chinese Communist Party,” Jeffries said of what the Democratic-led commission has been working on. “But on the other hand, we’ve got to ensure that the American people actually experience the benefits of artificial intelligence without being subjected to the very real, and very grave and very dangerous downsides.”

But while Jeffries is positioning Democrats as leaders on AI policy — now and in the next Congress — he declined to endorse a proposal from some of his colleagues to create a select AI committee if the party wins the majority in November.

“We’re focused on the substance, not the process,” he said, adding that any select committee discussions would take place after election day.

Jeffries did endorse the Ratepayer Protection Act — a bipartisan bill intended to shield Americans from energy costs associated with the data center boom — which is slated for a vote Tuesday.

“It’s a step forward,” he said. “More clearly needs to be done.”

Congress

Thune says ‘light touch’ needed on AI regulation

Published

2 hours ago

September 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he sees a role for Congress in regulating artificial intelligence — albeit with a “light touch.”

Thune’s comments, made to reporters in the Capitol as President Donald Trump publicly railed against regulating frontier AI models, are the first he’s made since industry insiders sounded alarm bells about the technology’s potentially catastrophic impacts on humanity.

“It needs to strike a balance, light touch. You don’t want to stifle innovation, but I think you also want to make sure that the more advanced threats can be mitigated, and there’s a capability in place to do that,” Thune said.

He added that he believed Congress could put “guardrails around those types of more consequential threats without in any way harming our ability to stay ahead in the AI race.”

Thune introduced an AI safety bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in 2023 and is negotiating a revised version that he said Monday “reflects the approach” he is advocating. Thune said he spoke with Klobuchar over the weekend about the revised bill, which is also being negotiated with Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and expressed hopes it would be finalized “hopefully soon” and that they can “get a path forward for it.”

Cruz previously told Blue Light News that he could hold a committee vote on AI legislation before the chamber adjourns ahead of the midterm elections — perhaps as soon as the end of next week.