House Republicans to Their Voters: Blame the Senate

House Republicans are home for a two-week recess and already blaming the Senate for Congress’ unproductivity amid a bitter cross-Capitol funding fight.

Spring recess comes roughly seven months before the midterm elections. With Republicans’ control of the House of Representatives at stake, they’re feeling pressured to show their constituents that they can deliver. They’re going home to tout policies, from last year’s tax-cut package to passing government funding bills, while the longest government shutdown on record, of any kind, continues at the Department of Homeland Security.

While Americans are seeing the fallout from the DHS shutdown with airport delays across the country, House Republicans insist they’ve done their part in getting bills passed, and that the upper chamber is where legislative productivity has stalled.

“The Senate has picked up a small percentage,” Rep. Ryan Zinke said of the bills the House has passed this Congress. “I’d say the House has done our job.”

Congress has been struggling for months to reach a deal to fund DHS. Members of Senate Democratic leadership tried to negotiate with the White House, insisting they wouldn’t fund immigration enforcement without reforms

The institutional blame game gained some heat last week when the Senate unanimously passed and sent the House a bill to fund DHS (minus immigration enforcement) in the wee hours of Friday morning. House Republicans promptly rejected that bill after senators had already left for the two-week recess.

“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a news conference Friday of the Senate bill. “I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill.”

Some conservatives in the House say they’re refusing to vote on anything the Senate sends them until the SAVE America Act, a conservative bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restrictions on mail-in voting, passes the Senate.

Republicans told NOTUS as they prepared to head home for the scheduled recess that they plan to argue that Congress’ current state of gridlock is the Senate’s fault.

“That’s not on the House. That’s on the Senate,” Rep. Jeff Hurd said of Congress’ lack of accomplishments this year. “We’ve accomplished a heck of a lot in the House.”

When constituents ask about it, Hurd said he tries to empathize.

“I’d say, ‘I share your frustration with respect to the Senate, and just know that in the House, we are doing everything we can to pass bills that help our district and our state and our country,’” he said. “I try to explain, ‘Listen, there’s a difference between the House and the Senate, and in the House, we have been remarkably productive in terms of the number, but also, more importantly, in the substance of what we’ve been doing.’”

Hurd pointed to the Fix Our Forests Act and permitting reform as two important issues now stuck in the Senate.

Rep. Tom Cole, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said he was “perplexed” and “disappointed” with the Senate after it finished the DHS deal in the middle of the night, and that he didn’t feel his conference was “dealt with fairly.”

“I feel like Mel Gibson in ‘Braveheart,’ when he’s got the whole Scottish army behind him and the English and Longshanks are there on the other side. He looks off to the right, and there the lords are riding away because they’ve cut a deal with the enemy on the battlefield,” Cole said. “So, that’s disappointing. That’s not the way colleagues treat one another. That’s certainly not the way I’ve been treated by Sen. Collins, I must say. But I do think, at the leadership level, that was inappropriate.”

Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican candidate for governor of Florida, expressed his frustration with the Senate — specifically its Democrats — after the House received the Senate’s DHS deal Friday.

“We got a lot of people here visiting the nation’s capital, and sometimes they come up here, and I hear a tourist mumble, ‘Man, this place is nuts,’ and it’s true because you have weak leadership in the Senate. They don’t do their job. They don’t do it effectively. They don’t even use common sense. They play political games,” Donalds said.

“I think everybody knows it’s not on the House. I think people invariably know that,” he later told NOTUS. “When you guys write these articles, typically, you say, ‘Congress can’t come up with a solution.’ But the truth is, the solutions have been there, the Democrats refuse them … because they’re playing midterm election politics over making sure that the key infrastructure of security for our nation is funded. That’s the story.”

“We have a responsibility to communicate that. I’m going to be communicating that,” Donalds added.

Rep. Blake Moore, a Republican from Utah, told NOTUS he talks to his constituents about the differences between the House and the Senate “all the time.”

He and several other Republicans said they talk about what the House has accomplished, like moving the farm bill out of committee and passing all 12 appropriations bills for this fiscal year.

“Constituents are always frustrated over Congress’ gridlock — that’s been an age-old, that’s been a centuries-old issue. When you highlight the ‘why’ and what we are accomplishing, then we’re good,” Moore said.