A tense debate broke out during a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans on Tuesday, a sign of the serious hurdles GOP leaders face ahead of a critical funding deadline for the nation’s chief domestic anti-terrorism agency.

According to four senators at the lunch session, a frustrated Sen. Jeff Sessions angrily dismissed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan, arguing that his party should be prepared for an all-out battle with Democrats to ratchet up public pressure and force President Barack Obama to drop his immigration policies. But Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican who could face a tough reelection next year, sharply countered that McConnell’s plan was the only option to not hamper law enforcement agencies that rely on money from the Department of Homeland Security.


The dispute between the vulnerable Republican and the Alabama conservative highlights the larger challenges facing McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. The two are staring at a Friday deadline to avoid a shutdown of DHS but are struggling to balance the demands of immigration hard-liners with Republicans who fear political and practical fallout from DHS shutting down.

McConnell has been quiet for weeks about his next steps. But his new proposal on Tuesday — to extend DHS funding through September while advancing a separate plan to block a portion of Obama’s immigration proposal — signaled that he’s nervous a shutdown could damage his party politically. Twenty-four GOP senators are up for reelection next year.

Boehner is in an even tighter jam: Any sense that he is caving to the White House could further erode confidence in his leadership among the far right, which is furious at Obama’s immigration push. Boehner has not directly addressed whether he’d put a stand-alone funding bill on the floor, and several Republican leadership sources say they favor several short-term measures to try to keep the heat on the White House.

Senate Democrats are refusing to sign on to McConnell’s proposal without a commitment from the speaker to move a “clean” DHS funding bill. But several House Republicans and their top aides have privately told POLITICO that a misstep by Boehner in this legislative skirmish could imperil his speakership. One said that Republicans would weigh trying to remove him from the position if he relents on his promise to fight the president’s unilateral action on immigration “tooth and nail.”

“Speaker Boehner has my sympathy in that he has a somewhat divided conference — he has to try to balance all the different influences within his conference,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “He has my sympathies, very tough work.”

In a sign of how difficult the path in the House is, one senior House Republican, who is close to party leaders and spoke anonymously to discuss strategy, said the Senate’s plan to send two bills to the House is “a joke.” Several top House Republicans believe the only way a clean funding bill can pass their chamber is if the DHS shuts down and pressure builds for a resolution.

For weeks, McConnell and Boehner have been on opposite pages on their strategies to break the immigration-DHS impasse — a sign of how the two men will have to continually reconcile conflicting agendas between the two chambers despite having total control of Congress for the first time in nearly a decade. The problem started after the November election, when Obama, ignoring warnings from GOP leaders, proceeded with a plan to defer deportations and provide work permits to roughly 5 million undocumented immigrants.

Struggling for a response, and fearful of a governmentwide shutdown in December, Republicans cut a deal with Democratic leaders to fund the entire government through September — except DHS, whose funding lapses on Feb. 27. House GOP leaders, scrambling to find the votes in their chamber for the December funding package, told their rank and file at the time that their party would have more leverage to force Obama’s hand on immigration when a newly empowered GOP Congress took up the DHS funding bill in February.

Last month, the House GOP moved forward with a $39.7 billion package for DHS. But it stood little chance of passing the Senate, where Republicans have 54 seats, six shy of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. The House plan would block not only the 2014 executive action but also the 2012 plan that Obama enacted administratively to shield young illegal immigrants from deportation. House Republican leaders made it clear to their Senate GOP counterparts that they needed to hold multiple votes on their plan, to show the upper chamber was putting up a fight.

After Senate Democrats repeatedly blocked the bill from even reaching a debate, McConnell said earlier this month that the next step was “up to” the House. But Boehner pushed back, saying it was in the Senate’s hands, feeding the perception in the Capitol that the two leaders failed to conceive of a plan out of the logjam from the onset.

“It seems like McConnell and Boehner aren’t even talking to each other,” one veteran GOP senator said. “It is mind-boggling.”

After Senate Democrats blocked the House’s DHS bill on Monday for a fourth time, McConnell proposed a new strategy. He offered a stand-alone bill — not tied to DHS funding — targeting the 2014 executive actions, something that might attract enough Democrats to clear a filibuster but would likely lack enough support to override a veto. And on Tuesday, he told his caucus that he would advance a $39.7 billion funding bill free of immigration language.

Jeh Johnson: DHS funding is 'critical'

Republican leaders in both chambers hope their sales jobs will be made easier by a recent federal district court order that blocked the 2014 executive actions. That ruling, handed down in Texas, argued the president unlawfully enacted the immigration policies. The Obama administration is seeking a stay of the judge’s decision and is planning to appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview Tuesday that the court case is “really the superior way for us to challenge the president.”

McConnell added: “With Democratic cooperation on a position that they’ve been advocating for the last two months, we can have that vote quickly. … I don’t know what’s not to like about this; this is an approach that respects both points of view.”

But a clean funding bill, several House Republican aides and lawmakers said, would be politically perilous. House Republicans almost uniformly would prefer a short-term DHS funding bill, which would give Congress the opportunity to revisit the department’s budget as court proceedings chug along.

“If you send it to us in two vehicles, then you have people saying, ‘Well, the president’s going to veto one and then sign the other, and then we have nothing to hold over this president’s head,’” the House Republican close to leadership said.

Responding to the developments and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s demands that the speaker commit to bringing up a clean funding bill, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel chided the Democratic tactics.

“The speaker has been clear: The House has acted, and now Senate Democrats need to stop hiding,” Steel said. “Will they continue to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security or not?”

At the Senate GOP lunch Tuesday, Sessions made a similar argument. He faulted the GOP’s messaging on the immigration fight and said the public would pin the blame on Democrats for refusing to debate a controversial policy — and shutting down DHS over the matter. Sessions has been adamant that the party should focus on the economic implications of the president’s immigration policies.

“Sen. McConnell has a difficult job, there’s no doubt about that,” Sessions told reporters later. “But I believe that the issue, the constitutional issue, is greater than a lot of people have fully appreciated.”

At the lunch, few Republicans jumped to Sessions’ defense. An outspoken foe of Obama’s immigration policies, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, asked pointed questions about McConnell’s strategy but didn’t criticize the leadership plan, senators said.

And Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and potential presidential candidate, stayed silent and left the lunch before it ended.

Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

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