SKIPPING TOWN

MAGA Senators Flee Washington to Dodge Shutdown Showdown

They passed a deal before dawn—then headed for the airport as it fell apart.

Just hours after pushing through a last-ditch deal to reopen parts of the government, MAGA Republicans appeared to do what they often do in a crisis: leave town.

TMZ spotted Ted Cruz on a flight out of Washington on Friday, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune was seen hurrying through Reagan National Airport.

“We’ve made some temporary headway, but we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Thune told reporters who caught up to him. Then, he too got on a plane.

The problem? That “headway” is already collapsing.

The bipartisan Senate bill that passed in the early hours of Friday morning would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security through September. But the deal notably excluded money for ICE and Border Patrol—red lines for the MAGA faithful in the House. So by midday, they had effectively blown it up.

Speaker Mike Johnson trashed the Senate’s work as “a joke,” while MAGA House Republicans fumed, claiming the bill reflected Democratic priorities by failing to fund immigration enforcement.

Some are now pushing a rival stopgap bill that restores funding for ICE and Border Patrol, but that idea would almost certainly go nowhere in the Senate. Which is a moot point considering most of the Senate has already left D.C.

Some didn’t even wait for the vote.

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Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn was spotted slipping through the airport on Thursday night, using an escort to shield herself from cameras.

The optics were brutal and the image quickly ricocheted online as a symbol of lawmakers ducking accountability.

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The Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down for weeks, clogging airport security lines as TSA workers—many of them unpaid—have started calling out of work in their thousands each day.

President Donald Trump scrambled to show action by signing an executive order to immediately pay TSA workers, but he can’t sidestep Congress on federal funding. Now, thanks to the House revolt, fixing the mess could mean dragging senators back from a two-week recess they’ve already begun.

Even Republicans are openly seething at each other.

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House lawmakers accused their Senate counterparts of dumping an unfinished deal on their desks in the middle of the night and then disappearing.

“The Senate has gone dark,” Johnson said, complaining there had been little coordination between the chambers.

Democrats say there’s no mystery left about who owns this mess.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued the Senate deal could have ended the shutdown immediately—if Republicans had backed it.

Instead, Washington is stuck in a familiar loop: a stalled negotiation and a growing pile of consequences for both federal workers and travelers.

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The end result is a shutdown defined less by policy differences than by dysfunction, and a Congress that, even in the middle of it, still managed to clock off early.

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