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

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.