Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, who leads the Appropriations Committee and is a longtime party political strategist, observed Wednesday that congressional majorities are typically lost because of either overreach or dysfunction.
Congressional Republicans appear to be choosing the latter option.
“Right now we don’t look as functional as we should,” Mr. Cole acknowledged, adding that bitter internal divisions and increasing finger-pointing among Republicans are straining the House and Senate to do some of their most basic work.
With the midterm elections approaching and control of both chambers in real danger, Republicans are struggling to pass necessary legislation, let alone specific political messaging bills in the months leading up to Election Day.
The House floor was frozen on Tuesday and stalled for several hours on Wednesday as Republican leaders sought votes and cut side deals. Two of those hours were spent laboring to win early votes to begin debate on a series of bills — which was considered a routine step until the current Republican majority came to power and rank-and-file lawmakers, mindful of their party’s vanishingly thin margin of control, insisted on moments like leverage.
The now routine move has become an extraordinary difficulty for Speaker Mike Johnson, who is constantly working hard to please various Republican factions, knowing that one wrong move, or reliance on Democratic votes to pass the bill, could pose a challenge that could cost him his job.
“We live in an age where leaders are afraid of their members, and members are afraid of their voters,” Mr. Cole said.
On Wednesday, heated discussions were prevalent on the Republican side of the aisle. MPs kept shouting at each other in the entire House. Mr Johnson grappled with holdouts and defectors, urging them to fall into line. Deals were cut, then reneged on, and even the GOP budget plan appeared to stall at one point as unrelated disputes were settled behind closed doors.
Some Republicans also accused their colleagues of being in the pocket of the pesticide industry — such sharp criticisms are usually aimed at members of the opposing party, as lawmakers don’t like to remind voters about the impact of political contributions.
Other Republicans shrugged off the growing political fight over the way business is done these days.
“It should be a fist fight over everything,” said Republican Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee. “This shouldn’t be easy.”
But the temperature in Congress was rising so much that Mayra Flores, a former Republican House member from Texas, urged her former colleagues to take it up behind closed doors.
“There is no reason to turn every issue into a public spectacle online,” Ms. Flores wrote on X, adding that she was “sincerely embarrassed” by the conduct of some of her former colleagues. “The country faces real challenges, and continued public infighting only makes the job harder.”
Republican leaders, trying to break an impasse that threatened to derail their entire immediate agenda, relented on Wednesday and agreed to rework a key agriculture policy measure that has historically been one of the more popular bills before Congress. But its path has been obscured by controversy over ethanol tax credits and opposition from a handful of Republican lawmakers who oppose liability shields for pesticide producers, which has angered the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida urged reporters to investigate Agriculture Committee members and the donations they receive from pesticide producers, saying, “It’s causing cancer and it’s making people sick.”
After sunset, Republicans were still laboring to advance a budget proposal to provide a $70 billion funding framework for President Trump’s immigration crackdown. He voted to expand the surveillance law, which the intelligence community says is vital to identifying potential terrorist attacks, but the Senate almost immediately said the House bill was unacceptable and would send back an alternative.
Lawmakers were not talking about how to break loose bipartisan legislation, passed in the Senate but stalled in the House, that would defund most of the Department of Homeland Security after a more than 70-day shutdown, as the administration warned that money to pay workers was about to run out again.
Top House Republicans accused Senate Republican leaders of mishandling the legislation and then trying to stall it in the House. He said the fact that the measure explicitly says “zero” dollars should be spent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol is unsettling to some Republicans, who fear they could be attacked for defunding the police.
Mr. Cole said the House wants changes, which could slow the bill down again in the Senate.
“All of this has happened because of poor management in the Senate and our not being open and transparent in the House,” he said.
But Senate Republicans believe they had made a deal with Mr. Johnson to pass the spending bill weeks ago, when he publicly supported it.
The impasse has tested the patience of usually even-tempered Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, who reacted sharply this week when Mr. Johnson suggested he wanted unspecified changes before the House could consider the funding measure.
“You have to find out what they were doing and whether or not it in any way affected the bill that we passed unanimously, not once, but twice,” Mr. Thune said, noting that he and Mr. Johnson had jointly announced an agreement to pass the funding legislation on April 1, and it still has not reached the House floor.
Should it get there, it would likely attract enough Democratic support to offset any Republican defections. But that’s one reason Mr. Johnson has been reluctant to move forward, because turning to Democrats for help passing legislation could upset his right wing and pose a challenge to his leadership.
As he assessed the situation, Mr. Cole said splintered Republicans had a clear choice: put aside their differences and move forward, or suffer the consequences.
“You can either be part of the functional majority and get almost everything you want,” he said, “or you can stick around and get nothing and be in the minority next time.”
