{"id":21994,"date":"2026-04-29T00:32:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/hill-republicans-want-trump-to-solve-their-internal-problems\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T00:32:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:32:28","slug":"hill-republicans-want-trump-to-solve-their-internal-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/hill-republicans-want-trump-to-solve-their-internal-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Hill Republicans want Trump to solve their internal problems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

House infighting is threatening to sink the GOP agenda on Capitol Hill. Now Republicans are hoping their most effective whip \u2014 President Donald Trump \u2014 is ready to come off the sidelines.<\/p>\n

The push for the White House to take a more active role comes as the GOP finds itself stalemated on several fronts with no sign that they will be able to navigate a way forward without Trump\u2019s direct intervention.<\/p>\n

The House floor was effectively closed for business Tuesday as days of internal negotiations failed to produce a deal among competing GOP factions, allowing Speaker Mike Johnson<\/a> to extend a soon-to-expire surveillance law or pass the much-anticipated farm bill.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, there\u2019s growing frustration among Senate Republicans and Trump allies that the House hasn\u2019t yet taken up their bill funding most of the Department of Homeland Security after Saturday\u2019s shooting at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner. Instead, in a bid to satisfy his own members, Johnson wants to make small changes to the bill, which would further drag out the partial shutdown that is already on day 74.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader John Thune<\/a>, who is careful to avoid telling the House what to do, was uncharacteristically direct Tuesday with his frustration over the other chamber\u2019s refusal to pass a DHS bill senators have already twice passed unanimously. He suggested Trump needed to intervene.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying as best we can to coordinate strategy with the House, but \u2026 it\u2019s going to take, obviously, I think the involvement of the White House to bust some of these things loose,\u201d Thune said.<\/p>\n

He said to House Republicans who are still criticizing the Senate\u2019s plan, \u201cI guess my question is, what was the alternative? That\u2019s what I said to them at the time. I mean, tell me, give me a better option.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans on the House Rules Committee agreed Tuesday night to tee up the votes on the spy-powers extension and the farm bill, among other measures, but there\u2019s no guarantee the rest of the House GOP will fall in line Wednesday on the floor.<\/p>\n

Trump hasn\u2019t been completely on the sidelines as the House has floundered. He sent a Truth Social message Monday encouraging the House to support a separate budget plan aimed at providing immigration enforcement funding \u2014 part of a two-track plan to end the shutdown. His budget office issued a memo Tuesday evening urging support of the Senate-passed legislation funding the rest of the department, which could run out of money to pass employees as soon as next week.<\/p>\n

Separately, White House deputies tried earlier this month to pressure House GOP hard-liners to back down in the fight over extending a spy law targeting foreigners abroad known as Section 702.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s missing in the minds of some Republican lawmakers is the type of sustained, one-on-one arm-twisting that Trump deployed on House Republicans last year on several occasions \u2014 including to push through the GOP\u2019s tax-cuts-focused megabill and to get Johnson elected speaker.<\/p>\n

Trump has instead been focused in recent days on the state visit from King Charles III of the United Kingdom, not to mention the military campaign in Iran he launched two months ago alongside Israel.<\/p>\n

\u201cMike\u2019s clearly having to wrestle with his House members, and it\u2019s not his fault,\u201d said Sen. John Kennedy<\/a> (R-La.). \u201cHe\u2019s good, but he can\u2019t work miracles. And I think the president\u2019s going to have to step in.\u201d<\/p>\n

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Thune\u2019s call for more presidential involvement on Capitol Hill. <\/p>\n

One House Republican, who has been in touch with Trump officials and was granted anonymity to describe behind-the-scenes conversations, said the White House wants \u201cDHS fixed this week.\u201d But so far Trump\u2019s arm\u2019s-length overtures haven\u2019t worked with House hard-liners who want to expand the scope of the party-line immigration enforcement bill to encompass other conservative priorities.<\/p>\n

Johnson has taken steps to assuage the holdouts. He has offered to attach a key hard-right priority \u2014 a permanent ban on the creation of a government-sponsored digital currency \u2014 to the spy-law extension before sending it to the Senate. The speaker is separately seeking to appease a group of farm-state members by attaching a year-round ethanol fuel measure to the bill authorizing agriculture programs.<\/p>\n

Thune, in an interview, shot down the idea that a Section 702 renewal with a digital currency ban attached could pass the Senate, calling it a \u201cbad idea\u201d that is \u201cnot happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Underscoring Johnson\u2019s dilemma, the comments sparked a public rebuke<\/a> from one of the conservative hard-liners, Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison<\/a>, who said, \u201cI don\u2019t care what Thune thinks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plenty of Republicans \u2014 both centrists and conservatives \u2014 are growing frustrated that Johnson isn\u2019t just putting the Senate-approved DHS funding bill, the other part of the party\u2019s two-part plan, on the floor. The bill includes funding for Secret Service paychecks, among other key security-related matters.\u201cThis is batshit,\u201d another House Republican said about Johnson\u2019s plan to push through several other bills this week but not yet the DHS fix.<\/p>\n

House GOP leaders want to put a reworked DHS funding bill on the House floor Thursday \u2014 but only after they clear the separate budget resolution Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Scores of conservatives have threatened to tank the Senate-passed bill unless the speaker strips out language that explicitly zeroes out funding for agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But many Republicans believe those holdouts would quickly cave \u2014 and end the record-long DHS shutdown \u2014 if Trump would simply apply some pressure.<\/p>\n

Rep. Don Bacon<\/a> (R-Neb.) said in an interview Trump should get more personally involved in pushing House Republicans on both the DHS legislation and the surveillance bill. Rep. Rob Bresnahan<\/a> (R-Pa.), meanwhile, said in a statement it was \u201cabsurd\u201d DHS was still shut down and that it is \u201cbeyond time to open the government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thune said Tuesday he also believed House Republicans should \u201cjust pass the bill\u201d as GOP leaders discussed whether they could \u201cmassage\u201d the contentious ICE funding language to the hard-liners\u2019 liking without threatening its rapid passage in the Senate.<\/p>\n

According to two administration officials and a person close to the White House who were granted anonymity to candidly describe the situation, there is little optimism inside DHS that the shutdown will end quickly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is really leading people to question why we even do [our jobs] anymore if Congress can\u2019t do their jobs,\u201d one of the administration officials said.<\/p>\n

Within DHS, the feeling is \u201cwe all know what the end result is going to be, so just do it \u2014 make it happen,\u201d the person close to the White House said. \u201cInstead it continues to drag on and drag on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House infighting is threatening to sink the GOP agenda on Capitol Hill. Now Republicans are hoping their most effective whip \u2014 President Donald Trump \u2014 is ready to come off the sidelines. The push for the White House to take a more active role comes as the GOP finds itself stalemated on several fronts with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}