The fighting cage on the South Lawn of the White House was supposed to be for a UFC night, but at this rate, Republicans might need it to settle their own disputes. GOP leaders, who are already dealing with five-alarm fires on everything from FISA renewal to reconciliation 2.0, are trying to manage the chaos of eleventh-hour deadlines on major legislation and a caucus in an extremely combative mood. The House is mad at the Senate, the Senate is mad at the White House, and Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) are just trying to make headway on anything resembling the party’s priorities.

Before the Memorial Day recess, Thune surprised some people by walking away from a reconciliation bill that would’ve funded ICE and Customs and Border Protection for three years — a direct rebuke of the Democrats’ decision to strip all immigration enforcement out of Homeland Security’s budget. But senators, still steaming over the president’s endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over sitting Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) and frustrated by the controversial $1.77 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” took the rare opportunity to buck Trump’s June 1 deadline and left town.

Now, their stand has created a massive traffic jam on the GOP’s priorities — which is only complicated by a long August recess that most members will need to campaign. Fortunately, one of the stickiest issues may have resolved itself, thanks to a federal judge who temporarily blocked the administration from launching the anti-weaponization fund that so many Republicans (and Democrats) opposed. The idea, Trump’s Attorney General Todd Blanche tried to explain in a fiery hearing, was to allow Americans to claim they were victims of government targeting and apply for compensation. It was, the DOJ argued, “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

Several GOP senators and congressmen blasted the concept as “utterly stupid,” “morally wrong,” “a slush fund … without legal precedent,” and “inappropriate.” Thune admitted he was “not a big fan,” while others generally panned the fund for its lack of oversight, the misuse of taxpayer dollars, and its potential to damage Republicans before the midterms.

By Monday, the president seemed ready to abandon the idea. After meeting with Johnson over the grueling weeks ahead (and the internal uproar over the optics of Trump’s fund), the DOJ announced that it would comply with the court order, “despite strongly disagreeing with the ruling.” In effect, “It’s dead for now,” an administration source told Axios. Another agreed, admitting, “This has become a distraction. The president believes [the] government was weaponized against people — it wasn’t just him. But this isn’t the time and vehicle for it.”

Even so, senators want more assurance that the push is, indeed, dead. “They need to settle it,” Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) emphasized. “They need to say what they actually mean and say, ‘We’re setting this whole thing aside.’” Thune told reporters he was “working on it,” when he was asked if the president was dropping the fund for good.

If the answer is yes, then the chamber might finally be able to move on the reconciliation bill that was put on the back burner in the next couple of weeks. Until then, at least a dozen GOP senators are refusing to break the logjam on immigration funding, which, most observers point out, should be something that unifies the GOP.

In the meantime, Johnson says, this entire intra-party debate is keeping the attention off Democrats, who are the reason America is in this ICE funding crisis to begin with. “I mean, this is an unprecedented thing and a really shocking one,” he reiterated to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “Democrats … want to reopen the border and not to fund the enforcement of federal immigration law, which has been on the books forever. They pulled those two subagencies out of the Department of Homeland Security funding bill, and so they made them orphan agencies effectively,” he said. “We’ve had to do [this] on our own. That’s the first time that [has] ever happened. It’s unprecedented. And it’s a very dangerous thing — a dangerous trend going forward.”

To the delight of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Republicans’ squabbling has taken the heat off of the Democrats’ absurd position, which has put American lives in legitimate jeopardy—a reality that was tough to shake after the third assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Apart from the Secret Service, who’ve been frozen out of funding, thousands of cybersecurity personnel, FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and other offices are scraping by.

“Sadly, the Democrats are playing a lot of political games at this point,” Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.) told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice. “People deserve to get paid for providing the protection we need as a nation against increased threats here and around the world.” Not only that, he underscored, but the Biden administration let 10 million people into the U.S. illegally, “and many of those sadly committed violent or sexual crimes against American citizens.” There’s a website, he added, for the worst offenders who broke the law with “violent crimes, murder, rape, child molestation, you name it. So this is not some theory,” Haridopolos insisted. “This is reality.” And now, he shook his head, “as we finally try to round up these rascals, we don’t have the resources because they won’t pass the budget.”

Johnson is optimistic that the ball will start rolling again in the Senate. “We’re awaiting what we’re now calling reconciliation 2.0 to come from the Senate to the House. I think they’ll work out the details on that. …” As for the chronic headache of getting everyone in the House on board, the speaker acknowledged the challenge of his small margins. “At many points along the way, we had a one-vote margin. And that’s effectively what we have right now,” the Louisianan conceded. “But I spent a lot of time on those relationships with individual members talking through their concerns and problems. It’s a lot of prayer and patience. As I say all the time, that delivers when we need to.”

Against all odds, he noted, “We’re getting the job done in spite of that small margin, in spite of the fact that they write our epitaph [and] our eulogy every week in the Hill press corps. They’re cheering for us to fail in some way. We don’t. We always deliver. And that’s because, at the end of the day, all the Republicans in Congress understand we have a job to do. We have to yield some of our personal preferences on occasion because it’s a deliberative body. But we’ll get the job done. We always have. We always will. We’ll do that next week as well.”