Republicans engulfed in 'bitterness' and 'bickering' as GOP enters civil war

Senate Majority Leader John Thune pushes his glasses up as he speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C., October 14, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

Republicans in the House and Senate are taking shots at each other as a new civil war erupts with the party over a new funding bill, per The Hill, with lawmakers descending into "bitterness" and "bickering" with no deal in sight.

In a report from Tuesday morning, The Hill detailed how the two GOP-controlled chambers of Congress are stuck "in a battle over how to move forward with funding the Department of Homeland Security" amid a contentious ongoing shutdown, with each chamber taking "diametrically opposed paths" to solve the problem.

The department has been enduring a shutdown after Democrats refused to pass a new funding bill without major reforms to rein in ICE and CBP agents. As airports became choked by massive security lines due to TSA agents not getting paid, pressure mounted to find a funding solution, with Republicans blocking multiple attempts by Democrats to fund just non-immigration portions of DHS.

Last week, however, Republicans in the Senate finally backed a partial DHS funding bill along those parameters, pledging to pursue ICE and CBP funding via an eventual reconciliation bill. In response, the House GOP revolted, rejecting the new bill "outright," according to The Hill. Speaking with the outlet, Brian Darling, a GOP strategist and former Senate aide, accused the chamber of “trying to bully the House into passing something they don’t want to pass.”

“It was a last-minute [bill] that they passed in three in the morning through [unanimous consent] and threw it over to the House, expecting that the House would have no choice but to pass the bill and the House said no,” Darling said.

The House, in response to that new bill, passed their own effort, an eight-week stopgap bill that funds all of DHS, but The Hill noted that this will be "dead on arrival with Senate Democrats."

“The Republicans are not going to be part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” House Speaker Mike Johnson raged at a press conference Friday. “The Senate Democrats have foisted upon this appropriations practice their radical and crazy agenda. They want to reopen the borders and they want to stop the deportation of dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, meanwhile, shot down the possibility of using reconciliation to fund all of DHS by a simple majority, something he said would become complicated and eat up valuable time.

"One of the reasons I think it was important to get these other agencies funded here is if you try to do it all in reconciliation it implicates a lot of committees of jurisdiction and any time you draw more committees in it gets a lot more complicated," he explained.

Darling explained that the breakdown between the House and Senate is being driven in part by their hugely different expectations for the midterms.

“Thune and Johnson are definitely on different pages,” Darling said. “The House is in grave danger of flipping to the Democrats. The Senate is not as much. It’s very hard for Democrats to take the Senate. It’s possible but it’s much harder. It’s an uphill battle for Democrats to do that."

Because of those expectations, he noted that GOP senators "are taking a more cautious and pragmatic approach to the Homeland Security funding fight while House Republicans, with their majority in grave peril, are digging in and fighting."

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