In a year of high-stakes midterm elections that may be President Trump’s last chance to pass major legislation, anger among Republicans in both chambers of Congress has reached a boiling point.
WASHINGTON – Some Republicans in the House are starting to speak more like Democrats.
Or, perhaps more accurately, they routinely find a common enemy: Senate Republicans.
Escalating tensions became clear on March 27, when hostility between Republicans in both chambers of Congress dramatically surfaced. House Republicans woke up to find that Senate Republicans had unanimously passed a bill in the middle of the night to fund the Department of Homeland Security, except for immigration enforcement. They then sent the bill to the other side of the Capitol and left town for a scheduled two-week recess.
Riots in Congress ensued.
“This ploy that took place last night was a joke,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).
In the words of Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia, “Senate Republicans have completely capitulated.”
North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, the powerful Republican chair of the House Rules Committee, called what her Senate colleagues did to Democrats “unconditional surrender.”
Tensions between the parties in the House and Senate are endemic to the institution of Congress, but the resentment within the Republican Party was almost palpable on March 27th.
This was the latest culmination of an increasingly undeniable and politically consequential pattern on Capitol Hill. In Congress, more moderate members of the less vociferous Senate are often at odds with their hardline conservative colleagues in the House of Representatives, where the majority is very small and legislative outcomes are often less predictable.
Republicans in the House and Senate have been at loggerheads in recent days over a variety of big issues, including mail-in voting, President Donald Trump’s tariffs, ending the filibuster and allowing senators to win large sums of money in government lawsuits. The president’s hands-off approach to running Congress, which also tends to allow people to whitewash his approval, is not particularly centripetal.
But the big events at hand will require as much unity as the Republican Party can muster. In the looming parliamentary battle over the second so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has barely managed to get even a single member of his side to defect. Fighting to pass another reconciliation bill that requires a simple majority in both chambers may be the only way Congress can approve cash to support the Iran war.
Next is the question of the midterm test. To avoid a potential disaster in November, Republicans are using all their persuasions to deliver the same message, trying to sell voters why their party should remain in full control for the next few years. Increasing intra-party friction will not help that effort.
But the Republican Party’s divisions are already helping Democrats, who typically have a harder time eating themselves up politically. At a Congressional hearing held after the Senate’s DHS funding deal collapsed, Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse was one of several House Democrats to criticize how Washington would function under full Republican control in the wake of the dysfunctional government shutdown.
“My Republican colleagues are truly living in fantasy land, trying to convince the American people that somehow Democrats control the U.S. Senate,” he said. “That’s unreasonable.”
Zachary Schermele is a Congressional reporter for USA TODAY. You can email us at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and on Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social..
