In December, at a meeting of the raucous Republican Study Committee in the basement of the Capitol, Georgia Rep. Tom Price made a recommendation he hoped would help resolve an uprising in his party over President Barack Obama’s immigration orders.

Republicans, who had just seized control of both houses of Congress, had howled in fury when Obama decided to protect roughly 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally. Republicans were demanding an aggressive and immediate response.


That’s when Price — a trusted conservative and the next leader of the House Budget Committee — made a pitch that caught steam and ultimately made its way to Republican leaders: Hold hostage funding for immigration enforcement and force Obama to relent on his policies.

“At the time, we were at a roadblock and I thought — many of us thought — we needed a way to get around that impasse,” Price said last week. “My sense was if we were able to tie funding for the president…to the portions of the appropriations process that dealt with immigration itself, that that would allow for us to focus the nation’s attention on the real problem, which is the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive action.”

But House conservatives wanted to go even further. Unable to temper antipathy toward Obama among the rank-and-file, House Speaker John Boehner agreed to back a more aggressive strategy: Restrict funding for the entire Department of Homeland Security and force the White House to capitulate in February when Republicans would finally have control of both houses of Congress.

Boehner was already under the gun: He was facing an election for speaker in the first week of January, meaning he had little margin for error. So he endorsed a tactic he believed would show his party was capable of effective governance and represented a unified opposition to a White House willing to stick its finger in the eye of Congress.

Instead, all it did was kick the can down the road and jeopardize funding for the entire Homeland Security Department — setting Republicans on a path toward internal discord and dissension, while shattering hopes for an orderly start to the new Congress.

On Friday, congressional Republicans suffered a humiliating defeat as they struggled to stave off a shutdown of the nation’s main domestic anti-terrorism agency. Only minutes before the midnight deadline, they managed to approve a one-week funding measure that did little to erase doubts about the strength of Boehner’s hold on his speakership.

This is not how Boehner and his counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, had envisioned for the first months of their partnership. On the morning after the election, in a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they had trumpeted their intention to “Get Congress Going Again,” pledging to “honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy.” They talked about tackling “a savage global terrorist threat;” education; excessive regulation; the national debt.

Immigration was not part of the plan. But it has become the party’s fixation and potentially its undoing as it struggles for a way out of a crisis of its own making.

In multiple interviews in recent days with party leaders and senior aides, it’s clear the GOP had no real strategy to successfully end the party’s first major standoff with Obama since taking power in January.

Republicans had hoped pressure would build on recalcitrant Senate Democrats to ultimately rebel against Obama and force him to capitulate — or at least prompt them to negotiate a compromise. That didn’t happen. They had hoped more public attention to the issue might be spawned by a new outside event, such as more migrant children appearing at the southern border. That didn’t happen. And they had hoped that more time would give their party a fresh opportunity to settle on a coordinated and coherent legislative response to the president. But that certainly didn’t happen.

“Never go into these things without a plan,” said one senior GOP senator.

The solution that wasn’t

McConnell was skeptical of the hybrid spending bill — the so-called “cromnibus” — proposed by the House in December, but he accepted it as necessary for Boehner to placate House conservatives. In conversations with congressional leaders, the White House questioned the wisdom of setting up the possibility of another shutdown fight in February.

Ultimately, Boehner and McConnell — with the consent of the White House and Senate Democratic leaders — passed the $1.1 trillion bill, funding all parts of the government through September and extending Department of Homeland Security Funding until Feb. 27. It passed the House by a narrow margin and then sailed through the Senate.

Congress adjourned for the year, seemingly on a winning note. In early January, the compromise was enough for Boehner to maintain control of the speakership, though he still lost 25 votes that startled the speaker’s allies. The deal-making did little to assuage the growing frustration inside his ranks.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate majority whip, said last week that had Republicans realized in December that fighting Obama’s immigration policies in the courts — rather than in Congress — was a more effective avenue, they would be better off now. A federal district judge in Texas blocked the Obama plan in mid-February, prompting administration plans to appeal the ruling.

“That would be the better route to go,” Cornyn said of the courts. “But we didn’t know that back then.”

But some Republicans saw this problem coming in December.

“That was the quickest thing we could do,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “But you know, when you can kick the can for a couple months, you do it — especially on an issue like this, and that’s what we did unfortunately. I think it was fairly predictable what would happen when we got here.”

Warning: cliff ahead

In mid-January, when House and Senate Republicans gathered in Hershey, Pa., for a rare joint retreat, McConnell and his leadership team tried to make sure the House rank-and-file understood there were limits to what the Senate could do. The House, as an institution, can pass legislation by running roughshod over the minority — but the Senate has limits, given the power of any individual senator to disrupt the process. Sixty votes are needed to overcome a filibuster in a chamber where Republicans only hold 54 seats.

McConnell tried to explain all of this to House Republicans — even putting it in a historical context, noting that since 1914, when voters began to popularly elect senators, Republicans have never occupied more than 55 Senate seats. And he reminded the House Republicans — who need 218 votes to pass legislation — if they had to overcome a supermajority like the Senate does, they’d need 261 votes, a much more difficult threshold.

“That’s just the way it is,” McConnell said.

House conservatives, who have long been skeptical of McConnell and the Senate, scoffed at what they saw was an effort to scale-back their ambitions after promising voters a furious assault on Obama’s agenda if they retook control of both chambers in the midterms.

“What I saw in the retreat over there was a lowering of expectations — that’s putting it mildly,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas), a tea party conservative.

So when it came time for the House to take up the $39.7 billion DHS funding bill, Republicans didn’t heed the warnings of their colleagues across the Capitol. They added immigration provisions that went well beyond attacking Obama’s 2014 executive actions, which even a number of moderate Democrats had expressed unease over during the heat of the midterm campaigns. House Republicans sought to gut a 2012 directive that protected young undocumented immigrants from being deported, and they tried to revive a program allowing local law enforcement to provide federal immigration authorities with fingerprints of people booked in jails.

Once Republicans targeted the 2012 deferred action program — a program favored by Democrats — Reid immediately saw an opening to rally his caucus against the GOP’s moves. And Senate Republicans saw the beginnings of a trap.

“In our pushback, we can’t be crazy about it,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who advocated only focusing on the 2014 initiative.

Boehner thought that McConnell and his leadership team would be able to get a DHS funding bill with immigration restrictions to Obama’s desk, where it would be met by a veto pen. Then Congress would be able to pass something more moderate, according to multiple sources. Even Cornyn thought that Senate Democrats would let debate begin on the House-passed DHS bill, paving the way for a compromise. But instead, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) caucus filibustered the House plan on four separate occasions.

At the Senate gym last month, Cornyn turned to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and expressed bewilderment.

“I told Sen. Schumer, I was kind of shocked,” Cornyn said. “I thought they would get on the bill and take advantage of the open amendment process to cast a lot of challenging votes.”

Cornyn added: “Of course, he was quite secure they had made the right decision, and they weren’t going to take advice from me.”

The Senate calculus

For Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, it was all about what proposal could get out of the House and could keep their conference mostly united — not what could pass the Senate. They knew full well their proposal would never become law. Even as the plan was being debated in the House, moderate Senate Democrats were scoffing at it and some GOP senators — like Nevada’s Dean Heller and Mark Kirk of Illinois — disparaged it.

But the House GOP leaders believed that by passing their plan with plenty of time — it was approved Jan. 14 by a 236-191 vote — the Senate could make changes to the House plan and the two chambers could reach a bicameral deal before Friday’s deadline.

Reid, however, had other plans.

Quietly, Reid’s caucus, led by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), circulated a letter in late January that won the endorsement of all 46 Senate Democrats — including moderates like Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — that demanded a “clean” DHS funding bill free of all immigration riders. To bolster their leverage, Reid convinced his caucus to unify and block the plan from even coming for debate.

Manchin said that McConnell and GOP leaders shouldn’t have been surprised that Democrats took such a hard-ball approach. On the Senate floor, Manchin warned McConnell that anything short of a clean bill would fail to win over Democrats.

“I said, guys, ‘If you don’t have me, you don’t have anybody,” said Manchin, perhaps the most conservative Senate Democrat.

Congress left for a 10-day recess in mid-February without a solution to the funding stalemate. There were no negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders, nor were there high-level strategy sessions taking place among top Republicans. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told anyone within ear shot about the dire impact a shutdown would have on his sprawling agency.

It was clear Senate GOP leaders would have rather focused on other matters that could unite their party and divide Democrats, especially after a successful January where they pushed through a bill to authorize the Keystone XL pipeline project.

In a Tuesday email sent by senior leadership aides to GOP Senate offices, top Republican staff urged senators to speak on the floor about other issues — beyond immigration and DHS funding.

“Outside the Beltway, voters are worried about jobs, the economy, national security, taxes, etc and not solely DHS,” the email from the Senate Republican Conference said.

Asked if continually focusing on the DHS matter would distract from the long GOP agenda, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the conference chairman, would only say: “We have a lot of other stuff to do, yes, and I’d like to get to it.”

McConnell, himself, was in a bind. Even though he knew full well he didn’t have enough votes to advance the House plan, he had to establish trust with House Republicans by showing he was aggressively pushing for it. He couldn’t appear to cave too early — so he decided to hold four procedural votes to begin debate, starting on Feb. 3 and ending Monday evening — all of which fell shy of breaking a filibuster.

In a number of closed-door sessions in the Senate’s Mansfield Room, Republicans debated a full range of options on their next steps — everything from passing a temporary stop-gap, to passing a stand-alone bill repudiating the president’s executive actions, to approving the clean DHS bill that Democrats wanted all along. Throughout the course of those closed-door debates, McConnell would say little about his thinking, a number of senators said.

“It’s safe to say that Sen. McConnell can hold his cards pretty close to the vest,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the leadership team.

It wasn’t until after the fourth and final failed procedural vote on Monday that McConnell announced his next step. He would move on a stand-alone immigration bill, authored by Maine Sen. Susan Collins, to block Obama’s 2014 executive action. He notified his leadership team of the move just 30 minutes before announcing it publicly.

No one knew what McConnell was going to do on the funding bill until Tuesday — when he informed Reid he would like to bring up a clean DHS spending bill. But he wanted to move on the Collins plan as well. Reid was adamant and insisted that Congress fully fund DHS first before debating the Collins plan.

In the Tuesday GOP caucus meeting, McConnell methodically laid out the facts about why his approach for two votes — one on the DHS bill, funding it through September, and another on the Collins plan — was the only way forward. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) furiously defended the strategy against an attack from Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, an immigration hardliner.

One tea party conservative — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — stayed quiet, as he has in private meetings through the course of the debate.

The solution crafted by McConnell and Reid did not have Boehner’s blessing. Distancing himself from the deal on Wednesday, Boehner said that he had not spoken to McConnell in two weeks. For eight years, the two very different personalities have maintained a policy of “no surprises” in their dealings with each other, scheduling regular meetings and constant discussions between staff.

But now, just days before a deadline with serious political consequences for the party, and for them individually, both men were scrambling for their own way out of a looming crisis, a departure from the shared vision demonstrated by their November op-ed.

McConnell had repeatedly urged the House to pass a different bill that might have gotten better treatment in his chamber.

Boehner, for his part, insisted he was “waiting for the Senate to act.”

On Friday morning, the Senate did act, approving the $39.7 billion clean DHS bill for the full fiscal year. That was more than House Republicans were willing to concede. It appeared, though, that a three-week stopgap measure might pass.

By Friday afternoon, even a three-week plan looked shaky. Boehner realized he was having problems not just with conservatives — but moderates, too. They didn’t like the strategy of demanding a formal conference with the Senate and were nervous that party leaders would ultimately pull the stop-gap measure from the floor. Boehner worked the House floor, speaking with the likes of Reps. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) to keep them in line.

It wasn’t enough.

On Friday, the dysfunction reached a climax, when 52 Republicans revolted and joined 172 House Democrats to kill a three-week stop-gap resolution backed by Boehner and House leaders. The breakaway group within Boehner’s party was double the number who had voted against him for speaker in early January.

As grim-faced House GOP leaders walked off the floor Friday evening, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) answered with a terse “Yeah” to a question about whether the defeat was a humiliation for the party’s leadership. Meanwhile, over in the Cannon Office building, a band of conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus was celebrating over alcoholic beverages, sushi and cheese pizza as they crafted their own plan, which was promptly rejected by leadership.

A one-week measure passed just before midnight, giving Republican leadership a few more days to come up with a plan.

Lauren French , Edward-Isaac Dovere and David Nather contributed to this report.