GOP leadership isn’t a bed of roses, the men heading up both chambers will tell you. “It is what it is,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said recently of the pressure from all sides. “You just roll with it.” While he and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) are sometimes on different pages when it comes to strategy, they probably agree on Thune’s joking retort to a reporter this week: “If [the president] could find somebody else to do this job, it might be a big relief.”

There’s no Purple Heart for navigating the thorny issues of Congress, and both men have taken their share of shrapnel from Republicans these last few months. Still, they’ve tried to work their way through what Thune called “quite a stack” of items on their to-do list — sometimes under the White House’s withering stare. With time ticking down to the August recess, Thune is sinking all of his energy into keeping the government funded past the midterm elections. But his path to success isn’t the same as Johnson’s, and that matters.

Thanks to the slim GOP majority in the Senate (even slimmer without the ailing Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.), Thune’s arms are tied. He has to work with Democrats to hit the magic 60-vote threshold he needs to pass a funding bridge into December. It also means that whatever the chamber agrees on isn’t going to match the version the House approved before it knocked off for summer recess. In a Congress where both chambers have to pass identical language, that could put leaders in a bind.

To sweeten the pot for Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) party, Republicans abandoned a couple of the president’s key priorities, including postponing a new rule that would give Trump’s political appointees more power over the federal grant approval process — a significant “rebuke” of the president, most observers noted. The current proposal does concede to some of the White House’s requests, including more dollars for Navy shipbuilding, 2028 Olympics support, and some housing assistance.

In its first real test, a cloture vote, the language passed with overwhelming Democratic support (89-4) — a fact that has some conservatives wondering just how good the bill is for Republicans. When Schumer lavishes praise on an effort like this, there’s cause for concern. And Monday, the minority leader insisted the CR was “a responsible path forward that allows continued bipartisan negotiations on a budget that delivers for American families.”

For his part, Thune defended the move as necessary. “Unfortunately, I think after two government shutdowns that have extended for a long period of time, it’s better for everybody if there’s predictability, certainty, and just to take that issue off the table,” he said.

But how Republicans take it off the table matters, as Family Research Council’s Senior Director for Government Affairs Quena González explained to The Washington Stand. “To borrow a football analogy, passing a continuing budget resolution is, by definition, a decision to punt the ball. In football, you normally only punt on fourth-and-long, when other options are unlikely to yield favorable results. Here, Senate Republicans are opting for a punt that doesn’t move the ball nearly far enough.”

The House also punted, but its motives were different. “[Their] vote for a continuing resolution last month,” González pointed out, “was an attempt to manage the clock: By passing a CR that lasts into December, House Republicans ‘punted’ the Democrats’ threat of a government shutdown past the November elections, depriving them of a last-minute political stunt.”

Thune’s chamber, though, gave up unnecessary yardage in the process. “While it’s true that Senate Republicans need to negotiate with at least some Democrats to get to 60 votes, they’ve gone much farther, giving in to Democrats’ demands — and even siding with Democrats to curtail the Trump administration’s ability to direct federal taxpayer funding away from ‘woke’ projects,” González lamented. “It seems inexplicable, from a strategic standpoint, to allow Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to drag the entire conference to the left and oppose the White House by siding with all Democrats to block President Trump from exercising more direct oversight of federal grants.”

Regardless, none of this is close to being decided. The House is out for the next few weeks, postponing any real debate on the two CRs until September. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) reiterated the sticking points to former Congressman and guest host Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Monday. “Now we’re talking about two different bills — what the Senate passes and what the House passed.” That complicates things, he reiterated, since the two chambers have to agree on identical language.

“The House passed what was probably the cleanest bill that could possibly be passed,” Carter underscored. “… I know that the Senate has added some anomalies and that may cause some problems…” But at the end of the day, he wanted people to know, the GOP has a singular goal. “I think Republicans are intent on making sure that we fund the government … unlike the Democrats, who want to waste taxpayers’ money and who want to close down the government down.”

Johnson’s caucus will have a few weeks to ponder the Senate’s deal with Democrats, and, as González noted, “We’ll see how House Republicans respond when they come back at the end of August. Hopefully,” he urged, “they’ll reject this play and insist on a more conservative funding stopgap than the Collins/Murkowski CR. While it’s true that leadership in both chambers has very thin margins, the Senate has here veered pretty far left.” He paused before adding, “I hope the House — which already sacrificed conservative goals in its version of the CR by only moderately holding down the growth of government spending and allowing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to resume flowing to abortion businesses, in consideration of the Senate’s 60-vote threshold — will hold the line.”