GOP Senate leader 'thrown under the bus' as Republicans panic about shutdown fight: report

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has his “back up against the wall” as a growing number of Republicans – including President Donald Trump – take shots at the GOP Senate leader for having worked with Democrats to end the ongoing partial government shutdown, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday.

“To put it bluntly, Thune feels like he’s been thrown under the bus,” wrote Punchbowl News’ Andrew Desiderio. “His allies have taken issue not only with Johnson’s approach to the [Department of Homeland Security] (DHS) funding fight but also with the insinuation that Thune somehow tried to pull a fast one on House Republicans by cutting a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last week.”

Last week, Thune reached a deal with Senate Democrats to pass a bill to fund DHS that excluded funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The bill then moved to the House, but was rejected out of hand by House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-LA), who instead put forward an alternative DHS funding bill that kept funding whole for ICE and CBP.

Now, a growing number of Republicans are targeting Thune for having cooperated with Democrats.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), for instance, said on Monday that funding DHS had become a casualty of “the Senate being too eager to recess.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said on Monday that there were “no excuses” for Thune having supported a DHS funding bill that excluded funding for ICE and CBP, and demanded that Thune “reconvene the Senate” and support a bill to fund DHS in its entirety.

And on Sunday, Trump said that the Senate GOP had been “playing it too soft” in the DHS funding fight, calling the Senate’s passage of a DHS funding bill without funding for ICE and CBP a “shame.”