House Republicans are at each other’s throats after the Freedom Caucus delivered a shock to party leaders on Friday by killing a key GOP bill over an unrelated simmering feud over immigration.

Speaker Paul Ryan and his leadership team were sure the group of three dozen rabble-rousers would cave. The partisan farm bill, after all, includes historic new work requirements for food stamp beneficiaries that conservatives have demanded for years. Plus, President Donald Trump leaned in, tweeting his support for the bill Thursday night to up the pressure on the far right.


But Ryan’s team sorely miscalculated. In an embarrassing show of weakness, the bill went down on the floor after a last-minute leadership scramble to flip votes.

Almost immediately, Republicans pointed fingers at each other. Freedom Caucus members said GOP leaders brought the matter on themselves by failing to pass a conservative immigration solution for Dreamers sooner. GOP leaders blamed the conservatives for upending a core Trump priority.

And some Republicans even blamed Ryan, arguing they’re stuck with an outgoing speaker who couldn’t get the job done.

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“Obviously the House Freedom Caucus is to blame, but this is the problem when you have a lame duck speaker who announces he’s leaving eight months in advance,” said one senior Republican source. “He can make calls to members to urge them to vote for something, but who will care?”

Ryan’s office put the blame on the Freedom Caucus. The group had been demanding a vote on a sharply conservative immigration bill, and Ryan’s team late Thursday offered such a vote — but not until June, incensing members of the caucus.

“This is all the more disappointing because we offered the votes these members were looking for, but they still chose to take the bill down,” said Doug Andres, a Ryan spokesman.

It is unclear if the conference would get another shot at passing Trump’s work requirements for the food stamp program, though the White House in a statement encouraged the House to try again. Leaders could decide to write a bipartisan bill instead without the food stamp cuts, which would be much easier to pass.

"President Donald J. Trump is disappointed in the result of today’s vote in the House of Representatives on the Farm bill, and hopes the House can resolve any remaining issues in order to achieve strong work requirements and support our Nation’s agricultural community," the statement read.

Seeming to feel the pressure, Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows argued that the bill would pass eventually — they just wanted to deal with immigration first.

"It’s not a fatal blow, it’s just a reorganization,” he told a swarm of reporters as he left the House floor Friday. "I think at this point we just really need to deal with immigration in an effective way.”

The legislation’s passage was always going to be tricky. Typically farm bills, which include agriculture subsidies and programs that help feed low-income individuals, are crafted and passed on a bipartisan basis.

But due to his looming retirement, Ryan has been in “legacy mode,” as one senior Republican source put it earlier this week. And he decided the farm bill should have a different path, instructing the House Agriculture Committee to craft a partisan bill with the work requirements. It was an opportunity for the longtime fiscal hawk to get one more signature policy checked off his list, after tax reform.

But other members of leadership saw problems right away: Democrats would never back an employment mandate for food stamp recipients — so Ryan’s gambit would require them to rely on their own fractured conference.

True to form, the Freedom Caucus took advantage of the predicament to get something they wanted on a wholly separate issue. The group was unhappy that a cluster of moderate Republicans were going to force votes on bipartisan bills protecting young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers — legislation many expect to pass with Democratic support.

One group member, Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, told POLITICO Thursday night that conservatives have been petrified that GOP leaders are going to strike an immigration deal with Democrats that ignores their own priorities.

So Meadows demanded that GOP leaders put the group’s preferred conservative Dreamer bill on the floor — legislation they’d been asking leadership to vote on since last year. The bill would extend legal status for Dreamers for a few years, build a wall, curb legal immigration, crack down on sanctuary cities and reform asylum for minors — proposals that even some Republicans are uncomfortable with.

In a Wednesday night meeting two days before the vote, Ryan agreed leadership could put the conservative proposal on the House floor in June. But that wasn’t good enough for Freedom Caucus members: they demanded that the vote happen before the farm bill.

GOP leaders weren’t willing to give them that, accusing the Freedom Caucus of moving the goal posts. So instead, they told the group: pick any date you want after the farm bill and it’s yours, according to one senior Republican source.

The Freedom Caucus held a late-night Thursday phone call to mull their options. If they backed down, they’d be seen as spineless; but if they didn’t, Trump could grow angry.

They risked the latter.

“Lean pass, but a real toss up,” said one senior Republican of the prospects of passage as lawmakers headed to the floor Friday morning.

Any confidence leaders felt earlier in the week melted away quickly on the floor. As lawmakers considered a series of amendments to the bill, Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and his chief deputy whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) buzzed from conservative member to conservative member trying to flip votes with mixed results.

McHenry huddled with Rep. Walter Jones, a fellow North Carolinian whom GOP leaders rarely rely on because he so often votes no. Jones voted no, as expected. Scalise sat with Sanford but couldn't move him.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his close friend Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) talked animatedly with Freedom Caucus member Jody Hice of Georgia, who they flipped. But that wasn’t enough to save the bill.

At one point, Meadows and Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan huddled with Ryan, McCarthy, Scalise and McHenry for tense discussion. It didn’t do any good.

Moments later, leadership just stopped working the vote, realizing the bill was going down. And when it did, Republicans exiting the floor fumed about the Freedom Caucus trying to take up the spotlight.

"It seems to me it was a case of not being able to take yes for an answer," said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is a member of the whip team. “It’s ridiculous … They were guaranteed a vote on a specific day, and that’s enough!”

Jordan defended their decision: “We need to deal with immigration in the right way — one where we actually build the border security wall, do the kind of things we need to do.”

GOP leaders say, however, there’s never going to be a conservative immigration bill that can pass the House let alone the Senate without Democratic buy-in. Ryan and his team have tried for almost half a year to tweak the Freedom Caucus’ favored immigration bill so it can pass with with 218 Republican votes. They can’t do it, they say.

Yet it was not the Freedom Caucus alone that put the nail in the coffin. Of the 30 Republicans who voted against the bill, more than half of them were centrists, not conservatives — and many of those are typically leadership allies.

One of those no votes was Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, the former energy and commerce chairman. Others, like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, have been heavily reliant on leadership’s help in their reelection efforts.

Some Republicans speculated that Ryan should have been able to land those members — and that a permanent speaker could have switched those votes.