Congress

Mourning Dick Cheney — and the US House

Published

4 months ago

November 21, 2025

It was just another Thursday in Washington.

Donald Trump was threatening to execute congressional Democrats, House members were mounting gangland-style political reprisals on one another and the following people sat next to each in the same pew at Washington’s National Cathedral to remember the life of Dick Cheney: Anthony Fauci, Rachel Maddow, Ken Mehlman and James Carville.

The former vice-president, who died earlier this month after modern medicine and a new heart let him see his grandkids become adults, would have been appalled at Trump’s conduct, amused by his coalition of the willing (mourners) and depressed by what has become of the House, where he represented Wyoming for a decade.

Cheney’s service was fittingly held the first full week his beloved House was back in session after a 54-day absence following the government shutdown. The dispiriting part is that after they reopened the government, lawmakers quickly turned on one another. Resolutions of disapproval and even expulsion were teed up, with the usual tribal, red-vs.-blue targeting of the other party — but also intra-party warfare between rival factions.

It was enough to make the bipartisan vote on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files look like a historic triumph of Article I power and legislative branch independence.

Now a decade into the Trump era, it’s easy to focus on his aberrant and indefensible behavior. In fact, we should — it’s important to not be inured to how he acts. Calling a female reporter “piggy,” treating visiting autocrats like they’re former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and saying of the Federal Reserve chair: “I’d love to fire his ass.” Which was all before he went on social media to say “Hang Them” of those Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video urging military service members to refuse illegal orders.

And that was all just this week.

Yet what’s disheartening about the breakdown of the House is it illustrates that the political rot runs deeper than just one man. Yes, Trump sets the example and has modeled the worst behavior. But we know who he is. This year makes clear, however, that the institutional decay in Washington may outlast his presidency.

Republicans have full control of the government, yet there have been more resolutions of disapproval or censure (three) voted on individual lawmakers than there have been votes on major bills (one). It has gotten so bad that a bipartisan duo is introducing legislation to raise the vote threshold to censure a member, to “raise the level of sanity in the House.”

Yes, the lack of legislative activity is in part because House members wrapped many of their priorities in legislation formerly known as the “one big, beautiful bill.”

But would any student of Congress really say this has been a productive year for the House? And could anyone tell you what their legislative priorities for the rest of this session have been since the BBB was signed in July?

And then there’s that pesky Article I language, the power distributed to Congress by the Constitution. There’s not a single member of Congress who could argue with a straight face, at least in private, that they’re acting the part of a co-equal branch.

Arriving for Cheney’s service, I encountered a former Republican congressional and White House aide, a conservative, dejected by Congress’s abdication of its authority. Had I seen, he asked, the clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month in which the speaker says he’s “cheering for the president” to win the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s power to levy tariffs without congressional approval? “I say that as a jealous guardian of the legislative branch of government,” Johnson added, irony unintended.

Not far away was John Thune, the Senate GOP Leader and a House member himself at the turn of the century. “It’s a different era,” Thune said.

“It’s a different era,” he said again, and without taking pleasure in the observation as he surveyed a sanctuary full of old guard Republicans and the Democrats doing their duty, whether out of obligation or respect for the Cheney family’s opposition to Trump after January 6.

The audience reflected the end of Cheney’s career, and the eulogists spoke of Cheney the father, grandfather, boss and heart patient more than they did the controversial vice-president, 30-something presidential chief of staff or Desert Storm-era defense secretary.

But there were reminders of the post that Cheney cherished so much, serving as Wyoming’s sole House member between 1979 and 1989.

There were a handful of his colleagues from that era, including the few still left in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyerm, as well as those who also ascended to higher office, like Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

And the man who, had he won, would have been Cheney’s classmate in the House class of ’78 couldn’t help but stand in the pulpit and recall his own defeat that year.

“The Republican wave didn’t reach West Texas that year,” said George W. Bush, recounting his only loss while generously noting that Cheney was undefeated.

More telling, though, were the descriptions of Cheney’s mind and curiosity. Nobody dared say it outright in such a solemn setting, but I couldn’t help but think of what has been lost in today’s House. There’s not many Dick Cheneys walking through that door (at Cannon) and the few who are soon look to run for the Senate, governor or walk away entirely.

Liz Cheney, his eldest daughter and the former congresswoman, recalled her father as a college dropout, working on power lines in Wyoming by day but reading Churchill’s history of World War in a sleeping bag at night. She and her sister, Mary, would grudgingly go along with him as young girls as he took them to museums and battlefields, reading every word on every plaque to their consternation.

And then in the winter of his life, as Liz recalled, she and her father went back to some of those same historic sites. And even as he declined, he would still come armed with that day’s newspapers, the latest issue of The Economist and a book.

He was, Bush noted, “a serious man.”

If only the same could be said for so many in today’s House.

This isn’t to bask in blind nostalgia — those beneath the gravestones at Section 60 in Arlington and even more Iraqis should have their say in any full appraisal of Cheney’s career.

Yet nobody would argue that the current Congress and particularly this House are worthy of a great country.

There are still members who would’ve flourished in Cheney’s day, but even they are sober about the state of the institution.

“This is one of those eras in which you read Kipling’s classic poem, ‘If—’ over and over and then get up and go to work every day,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the House Appropriations Chair, told me. “The aim isn’t to rebuild Rome in a day. It is just to make things a bit better every day.”

Liz Cheney can’t because, unlike most all of her former GOP colleagues, she couldn’t and wouldn’t get over what Trump did on January 6 — and her state rejected her because of it three years ago.

I thought Thursday about that 2022 primary and recalled what stood out to me about an interview I conducted with Liz shortly before her inevitable defeat that summer.

She inveighed against Trump and the danger he posed, but she said something more about her party and the institution in which she then served.

“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in debates about policy,” Cheney told me then, wishing Americans would “vote for the serious candidate.”

Then she went further.

“I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert,” she said, adding of her then-House Democratic colleagues with national security backgrounds: “They love this country, they do their homework and they’re people who are trying to do the right thing for the country.”

Cheney’s father had just recorded an ad for her, calling Trump “a coward,” and she was thrilled to have him by her side in her final House campaign.

“I talk to him every day,” she said. “He’s just a source of tremendous wisdom across the board, he’s such a student of American history.”

I reminded her that he co-wrote a book with his wife, Lynne, on House greats — Kings of Blue Light News – and she laughed for one of the few times that day. “Well, my mother wrote that — a sore subject,” she joked.

Would you have stayed in the House had your dad not so revered the body? I asked.

She dodged the question but turned more serious, explaining she was “so glad” she stayed — even though her career was nearly over.

“Having the opportunity to help make sure that we protect any future January 6ths, it’s the right thing to be doing,” Cheney said.

Her father also left the House without becoming one of those Kings of Blue Light News.

Had he not been appointed Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, the taciturn Wyomingite may well have become speaker. Cheney was House Minority Whip when he left Congress in 1989, the back-up plan for Bush after John Tower’s Pentagon nomination was rejected by the Senate.

He was a man of the House and relished that his daughter, Liz, followed him there and was even happier when she declined to run for the Senate in 2020. She seemed in that moment poised to eventually claim the post that eluded her father once he left Congress.

But five years later Liz Cheney was out of Congress, honoring her father’s fidelity to the Constitution over party and then, in a moment that spoke louder than words, stopping on her way down the aisle as his funeral ended to hug Pelosi.

It was a poignant moment, the two mothers of five and daughters of House members who rose to the leadership as political opposites but bonded when duty called.

Former Rep. Richard B. Cheney (R-Wyo.) would’ve liked it.

Congress

The DHS shutdown might never end

Published

16 hours ago

March 31, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Washington is locked in a high-stakes game of chicken over Department of Homeland Security funding, raising the possibility that thousands of federal workers could go unpaid for several more weeks — if not longer.

The shutdown is already the longest ever experienced by any part of the federal government, and in recent days the political sparring has gone from being a mostly partisan showdown between Republicans and Democrats into a messy internal battle for the GOP.

Both the House and Senate have adjourned for two weeks, with neither chamber seriously considering returning early despite a wave of online outrage and calls from the White House to return to session. Instead, House Republicans and Senate Republicans have spent the last several days pointing fingers at each other, while Democrats dig in against funding immigration enforcement agencies without implementing guardrails the GOP has resisted.

“The House has their process, we have ours and this happens periodically,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told reporters Monday.

There is no immediate hope the standoff, which has affected tens of thousands of workers since it began Feb. 14, will soon end. An administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly said that “people are thinking this will go into the summer.”

“Morale is low. The TSA getting paid while the rest of us summer is not playing well inside the building,” the official added.

Bipartisan negotiations over immigration enforcement changes have gone almost nowhere, according to several people granted anonymity to candidly describe the talks. House and Senate Republicans are in a public tug-of-war over their competing Plan Bs. And President Donald Trump is doing little to unite his party behind a consensus position — let alone pushing them to cut a deal with Democrats.

Perhaps most worrying for those eager to end the stalemate is that the strongest impetus for a deal — the hourslong security lines at some U.S. airports — is already dissipating.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s decision to step in and fund TSA paychecks — a move privately encouraged by some Republicans — saying that the president had to do “what’s right to end this crisis that we’ve had at air travel and at airports across the country.”

But a DHS official granted anonymity to speak candidly said Trump’s decision to pay airport screeners, as well as the unanimous passage of a Senate GOP plan to fund the vast majority of the department, stripped Republicans of their main pressure point.

“Remember in the last shutdown, it was airport chaos that forced the seven Democrats to switch sides and fund the government,” the official said.

While about 50,000 airport security officers are now getting paid under Trump’s executive action, thousands more workers remain furloughed or working without pay. Those include more than 2,000 employees of the premier federal cybersecurity agency, more than 4,000 FEMA workers as well as more than 1,000 Coast Guard civilians.

DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that the record-breaking shutdown was affecting department employees tasked with protecting Americans and visitors for the upcoming World Cup soccer tournament and America 250 anniversary celebrations,

“Democrats need to stop holding these hard-working DHS employees’ pay hostage and putting politics above national security,” she said.

But as far as Democrats are concerned, they have struck a shutdown-ending deal — the Senate legislation passed early Friday morning by voice vote that would fund all of DHS except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and some parts of Customs and Border Protection. House Republicans rejected that bill and passed their own legislation late Friday that would fund all of DHS through May 22.

No senator attempted to pass the House measure in a brief Monday morning session, and in a sign that a consensus deal is nowhere close, some Senate Republicans want to instead try to fund the entire department through the party-line budget reconciliation process. That would bypass Democrats but require time-consuming procedural steps and potentially create messy new divides among Republicans.

Still, Hoeven said Republicans might have no better choice than to enact DHS legislation themselves for the remainder of Trump’s term.

“We’re not going through this again with the Dems,” he told reporters after the Senate session Monday. “We’re taking this off the table.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) also argued Republicans need to accept that Democrats will never fund the immigration enforcement agencies that became politically toxic on the left after federal agents killed two people in Minneapolis in January.

“The only thing I know to do is to take the Democrats out of it,” Kennedy said in an interview. “Just do the entire DHS budget under reconciliation.”

The problem for Republicans is they want to do much more than DHS funding in reconciliation, with the House and Senate GOP holding vastly different visions for the effort. Conservatives in both chambers are pushing to offset any new spending with cuts elsewhere — a politically tricky ultimatum.

Under the plan Senate GOP leaders passed last week, the consensus funding bill agreed to by Democrats would be paired with a reconciliation bill narrowly focused on immigration enforcement. Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned that trying to do all of DHS under the party-line process “gets a lot more complicated.”

Instead, Thune approached Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the House rejected the Senate-passed bill to try to find another path to funding as much of DHS as possible. But expectations for a deal are low, given Democrats’ repeated rejections of stopgap funding bills. Still, Thune is expected to spend most of the two-week break trying to find a bipartisan path out of the funding impasse, according to a Senate GOP aide granted anonymity to disclose private scheduling.

A bipartisan group in the House has pitched its own plan to pair DHS funding with immigration enforcement changes. But the Senate conversations aren’t headed in that direction, absent a shift from the White House, with Thune saying the “ship has sailed” after Democrats rejected multiple GOP offers on enforcement restrictions.

Thune is dealing with pressure from the White House, online activists, House Republicans and even some of his own members to bring the Senate back into session before its scheduled April 13 return date.

In a head-scratching subplot, a few Senate Republicans have publicly suggested they did not agree with the deal they could have derailed in advance, while others have privately questioned Thune’s strategy given how quickly it unraveled in the House.

The bill was approved at 2:19 a.m. Friday after Senate GOP staffers ran a “hotline” — an established process for clearing measures slated for passage by voice vote or unanimous consent.

In addition to checking with Senate offices in the hours before the vote, Thune also briefed his conference Thursday evening on a developing plan to try to pass a bill funding as much of DHS as possible, leaving ICE and parts of CBP for reconciliation.

But Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said later that morning he opposed the deal. Asked why he didn’t object to the hotline or on the floor — or if he would try to pass the House bill in the Senate — a spokesperson pointed back Monday to his social media posts.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly expressed regrets online after his social media followers aired outrage about the overnight vote. He explained on X that he “had every reason to believe President Trump and House Republicans were on board” with the play and thus “declined to call in an objection.” Spokespeople for Lee didn’t respond to questions Monday.

Hoeven, a close Thune ally, defended the majority leader Monday saying he “absolutely” believed leadership was handling the DHS funding fight well. He brushed off some of the intraparty grumbling as sour feelings about the long-running standoff.

“I think there’s some real frustration because the Democrats want to go back to open borders, and they’re blocking funding,” Hoeven said. “So I think you’re hearing some of that from senators.”

Eric Bazail-Eimil, Katherine Tully McManus, Calen Razor and Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.

Congress

DHS stopgap set for quick House action after Rules Committee vote

Published

4 days ago

March 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House Rules Committee advanced a measure Friday evening that would fund the entirety of the Homeland Security Department through May 22 — without setting up debate or a separate vote on the funding bill itself.

The panel, after a raucous meeting that devolved into shouting at multiple points, voted 8-4 on party lines to advance the measure to the floor.

The rule includes a “deem and pass” provision, a tactic that allows legislation to be passed by the House automatically once the rule itself is adopted. While there will be one hour of floor debate and a vote on the rule, there will not be a standalone House vote on the DHS spending bill.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) described himself as needing “a neck brace” from the whiplash of hearing Republicans argue for hours that the Senate’s early-morning voice vote on a different DHS funding measure was “shameful” for lack of transparency and accountability.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) accused the Senate of moving their bill “in the middle of the night, with the smell of jet fumes in the air,” lamenting that the House was left “to take it or leave it.”

House leaders, McGovern suggested, have chosen a similar path by fast-tracking the eight-week DHS stopgap.

“You’re in charge,” he told Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). “You can do whatever the hell you want to do.”

Congress

Rand Paul weighs a 2028 presidential bid

Published

4 days ago

March 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is considering a bid for president in 2028, as Republicans jockey for the future of the GOP post-Trump.

In a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview airing Sunday, a reporter asked Paul about an article that implied he would be running for president.

“We’re thinking about it,” Paul said. “I would say fifty-fifty,” adding that he would make a final decision after the midterm elections.

Paul ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 with a libertarianism-focused campaign but ultimately dropped out after a poor performance in the Iowa caucuses and a shortage of cash. He instead ran for reelection to the Senate.

Paul has had a complex relationship with his own party and with President Donald Trump, often finding himself the lone Republican on certain issues. More recently, he was the only Republican to support a joint resolution that would limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.

His father, former Rep. Ron Paul, also ran for president three times: first as a Libertarian in 1988, and twice as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.