House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., may have won the battle, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., won the war — just not before President Donald Trump left both men politically bruised.
The Department of Homeland Security shutdown, and the Republican efforts to resolve it, exposed deep fractures between Johnson and Thune.
The Senate leader appeared to have broken the impasse early Friday morning, when the Senate unanimously backed a deal to fund most of the agency and leave only the most contentious parts of DHS to a future reconciliation bill. It looked like a workable compromise.
Just minutes after the Senate passed the bill on Friday, at 2:41 a.m. to be exact, Thune sounded cautiously optimistic about Trump’s support.
“Do you think he will be supportive of this and eventually sign it?” MS NOW asked.
“I hope so,” Thune replied. “I never speak for him, but I think he understood where we were. Hopefully this gets across the finish line.”
It didn’t, at least not right away — and not before Johnson played a key, and previously unreported, role in derailing the legislation.
Speaker-phone
Later that morning, during a House GOP leadership meeting, Johnson called Trump to say his conference could not pass the Senate deal, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.
With the president on speakerphone, Johnson pitched Trump on a short-term stopgap to fund all of DHS through May 22 — an idea Democrats had repeatedly rejected.
During the call, Trump suggested attaching the SAVE America Act — legislation requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote — to the DHS bill. But Johnson steered the president toward a clean funding measure, according to the sources, who were granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
House GOP leaders came away believing Trump was also apprehensive about the Senate deal. Johnson moved ahead with his stopgap plan. And by that afternoon, Trump had taken sides publicly.
“It wasn’t good. It wasn’t appropriate,” the president said of the Senate bill in a phone interview with Fox News.
“You can’t have a bill that’s not going to fund ICE,” he said.
Just days later, once it became clear to Trump that Johnson’s plan was not going to work, something that was clear to Thune all along, Trump flip-flopped. He urged Republicans to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border security through budget reconciliation, setting a June 1 deadline and effectively backing a return to the original Senate deal.
Within hours, Johnson and Thune released a joint statement backing the Senate deal. Johnson was supporting a plan he had, according to a source on a private conference call with House GOP members, called “a crap sandwich” less than a week earlier.
“I want you to know I fought vigorously for our position,” Johnson told House Republicans on Thursday during another private conference call with GOP members, according to a source on the line. “I lost my temper at one point.”
It’s just the latest example of the disconnect between Thune and Johnson, who have found themselves at opposite ends of a handful of policy fights on Capitol Hill. And it’s part of a long-simmering standoff between the House and Senate’s GOP conferences as they navigate a tenuous trifecta in Washington.
Now Johnson has the job of selling the plan to a conference that cheered him on for his strong opposition — a tall task that has already proved difficult.
“We boxed ourselves in on what we said about that,” Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn., said on the call on Thursday, according to a source.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., called the situation “completely unacceptable” and “an abomination,” the source said.
And Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., asked how Republicans could, “with a straight face, turn around and take a position that is both completely ideologically inconsistent with what we said a week ago and incredibly procedurally dangerous.”
‘No one was involved’
Despite ending up on the same page, Johnson and Thune seemed to be operating from different playbooks. And exactly what was communicated to whom, and when, quietly became a contested subject.
After the Senate passed its bill early Friday morning last week, Thune told MS NOW that, while he had not “spoken” with Johnson, he had texted with him overnight.
“Went back and forth a little bit,” Thune said.
But that apparently was not the version of events that Johnson presented to his conference later Friday.
“They cut off communications with us last night,” Johnson told his members on that Friday conference call, according to the source on the line. “The Senate did this without informing me or even all of their members or the White House. No one was involved.”
Frustration with the nature of Thune’s notification extended beyond the speaker.
One House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive dynamics, griped that Thune texted Johnson and did not call him about a deal of such magnitude.
“When you do something like that, you don’t fucking text. You pick up the phone and call,” this House Republican said.
But multiple sources familiar with the talks told MS NOW that Thune gave Johnson advance notice, and they suggested Thune was the one taken aback by Johnson’s sudden opposition to the deal — to say nothing of Trump’s sudden hostility.
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‘We’re gonna lose our base’
Johnson’s rejection of the Senate deal did not come out of nowhere.
For days, the speaker resisted efforts to split ICE funding from the broader DHS package. And behind the scenes, he was facing pressure from across his conference.
Shortly after the Senate passed its bill last Friday, Johnson huddled with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, according to two sources and a House Republican familiar with the meeting who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversations. The group had just blasted the Senate plan publicly, calling instead for a full DHS funding bill paired with the voter ID provisions that Trump wants.
“We’re gonna lose our base if we don’t pick a fight here,” the House Republican familiar with the meeting told MS NOW.
Johnson ultimately proposed a clean, eight-week stopgap — a compromise conservatives embraced as a way to push back on the Senate.
But pressure was not just coming from the right.
At a House GOP fundraising event that same morning, a vulnerable Republican warned Johnson about the political risks of a reconciliation package that could include ICE funding, border spending, and potentially billions more for the war in Iran.
“My district hates all that,” the lawmaker said, according to a source familiar with the exchange.
At the same time, Senate Republicans have become increasingly frustrated with House lawmakers thinking they should dictate legislative products — or that Republicans could do more if the Senate would just try.
As one senior GOP aide told MS NOW, “There are a lot of Senate parliamentarians serving in the House.”
Of course, this latest standoff does not exist in a vacuum.
In November, after the House passed legislation compelling the Justice Department to release all the files pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein, the Senate approved the bill through unanimous consent, ignoring the speaker’s call for the bill to be changed.
That same month, senators quietly slipped a provision into a government funding bill that would allow senators to sue for up to $500,000 if their phone records were obtained as part of Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost investigation. The provision prompted fierce pushback from House lawmakers — Johnson in particular.
Johnson also held the House out of session throughout the government shutdown last fall, a move that Thune diplomatically, but clearly, took issue with.
Two leaders, two realities
All of these clashes underscore the fundamentally different political realities facing Thune and Johnson.
In the Senate, Thune must navigate the 60-vote threshold, forcing bipartisan compromise to move almost any legislation.
In the House, Johnson operates with a paper-thin majority — and constant pressure from Republicans who are willing to revolt. Hard-liners also wield a powerful tool: the motion to vacate, a persistent threat that could cost the speaker his job.
The differing landscapes give Thune more room to cut deals — and leave Johnson with far less.
“There are different dynamics,” one Senate Republican told MS NOW. “Johnson has to contend more with his right flank. Thune has to deal with senators in the middle. They’re playing to different bases.”
But increasingly, both are navigating a third force: a president whose shifting positions could upend the process overnight.
And just because Trump backs one side on Friday, it does not mean he won’t completely reverse course days later.
For Johnson and Thune, the lesson was unmistakable: in Trump’s Washington, today’s marching orders can easily become tomorrow’s liability.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.