GOP leaders plan to keep Congress out of session even as pressure to end DHS shutdown grows

By Annie Grayer, Morgan Rimmer, CNN

(CNN) — Lawmakers have departed Washington for spring recess locked in a stalemate over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. But even as their movements outside the halls of Congress face increased public scrutiny, Republican leaders are showing no signs they’ll force their members to come back early to hash out a deal.

Photos of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham dining in Florida at Disney World over the weekend surfaced in tabloid TMZ, while Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia was spotted at a casino in Las Vegas. The images drew swift backlash as they rapidly spread across social media Monday.

The senator, a key Trump ally, said he had met with Trump official Steve Witkoff in South Florida for discussions on normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, before meeting friends in Orlando after. And the congressman was visiting family, his office noted, and will return to Washington, DC, as soon as Republicans call members back into session.

But the optics of the lawmakers traveling as the DHS remains shut down is ratcheting up pressure on the Republican-led Congress to shorten their previously scheduled Easter and Passover break. And it is exposing how GOP leadership is at odds about the best path forward to fund the key agency and end a shutdown that shows no signs of abating.

“I’m just really, really, really tired of it,” GOP Rep. Jeff Van Drew told CNN of the shutdown politics Monday. “I’m really pissed off. Really sick of it. Quite frankly there’s fault on both sides. Nobody’s pure in this.”

Van Drew’s New Jersey district is home to the largest Coast Guard training center in the country, and he is furious that lawmakers returned home for the recess without a deal to fully reopen DHS, where thousands of federal workers are still going without pay, including Coast Guard civilian employees.

Van Drew joins a growing chorus of Republicans, under political pressure, who are arguing that their GOP leaders should cancel recess and bring lawmakers back to Washington, DC, until a deal is done. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that President Donald Trump is “encouraging” Congress to return to find a solution, arguing the president — who has ordered DHS to unilaterally pay Transportation Security Administration employees to alleviate recent travel chaos — cannot continually step in when Congress fails to do its job.

Part of the problem is the House and Senate are not on the same page about the path forward. The two Republican-led chambers passed competing proposals for how to fund DHS and left town without a plan to rectify their differences and end the shutdown.

The Senate passed a bipartisan deal to reopen DHS in the early morning hours of Friday that would have reopened the agency, critically without funding for the border and immigration departments, and then left town as much of Washington slept. Republicans, Thune argued, had already provided billions in funding to the administration’s border patrol and immigration enforcement efforts through Trump’s sweeping domestic policy package last summer.

House Republicans, meanwhile, rejected the Senate legislation outright, with Johnson calling the Senate’s maneuver’s “a joke,” and sent back a package that would fund all of DHS, even though it has no chance of passing in the Senate. The House, a leadership aide noted, has four times passed a bill to fund the entire department, whereas the Senate has not done so a single time.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune believe the ball is in the other’s court to call their members back to session after each passed a plan at odds with the other. Neither leader appears willing to blink even though Republicans have publicly placed the blame solely on Democrats. And Democrats continually point to the fact that they do not control either chamber.

Thune privately told his conference that he does not plan to interrupt his chamber’s recess for another “show vote,” and won’t bring senators back to Washington until there is a deal with Democrats to do so.

“In order for the Senate to come back, you’d need something for the Senate to consider,” a Senate GOP aide told CNN. “And since Democrats would kill the House-passed bill, we don’t have something to consider.”

When Republican senators had the chance Monday to take up the House DHS package through a brief Senate session where no business was conducted, called a “pro forma,” no one took it. North Dakota GOP Sen. John Hoeven, who was in the chamber, told reporters he did not take that step because with Democratic Sen. Chris Coons in the chamber to object, he knew it would fail.

“It’s the difference between just doing it as kind of a show vote, if you will, and actually working to try to get consent on all or some part of the legislation we passed,” said Hoeven. “So, we are having that negotiation, remember, not only with Democrats, but with our colleagues in the House.”

Coons, for his part, pushed back against building frustration that the Senate and House have left Washington for a two-week recess, even as DHS remains shut down.

“You know well that we’re not ‘off,’” said Coons of Delaware, adding, “We’re working every day in our home states. For most of us, this is when we have the time to go up and down our state and to meet with our constituents.”

Even if GOP leaders were to call their members back to the US Capitol, attendance would likely be a major concern given lawmakers typically schedule international work trips and events in their districts when Congress isn’t in session.

A spokesperson for Graham said the senator has events planned throughout the state the rest of the week.

Garcia spokesperson Sara Guerrero told CNN in a statement that the congressman’s “family owns a home in Vegas, his father has been living there for over 15 years and he was visiting him. As he stated the day Speaker Johnson sent Congress home, it is crazy for Republicans to reject the deal on the table and send members home while the American people suffer.”

Rep. Don Bacon dismissed the tabloid photographs as a distraction from the larger problem.

“It’s gotcha-politics,” the Nebraska Republican said of the emerging TMZ images. “The real embarrassing thing is we’ve had the two longest shutdowns this part year and it is dysfunctional. This shouldn’t have been hard to sole if people were willing to find consensus.”

The fastest way to ensure the DHS shutdown ends, Van Drew suggested, is to not only take away the paychecks to members of Congress, but also to prevent them from receiving back pay.

“You can’t get your act together to get a budget done? Guess what. You’re not getting paid. You get paid when everybody is back to work and by the way you’re never going to get that back pay. You lost it. Then you’re not going to have any more shutdowns,” he argued.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.