Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) demands that the House Republicans back a clean Department of Homeland Security funding bill before Senate Democrats will drop their filibuster, but that proposal met with a chilly response among House Republicans during their weekly conference meeting.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) “restated that ‘it will be a long two years’ if we start passing bills based on what senators told us to do,” a Republican lawmaker in the room tells National Review.

It’s not clear yet what Republicans will do in response to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to strip the language blocking President Obama’s executive orders. McConnell has scheduled a separate vote on language targeting the orders that the president issued in November, but that is not tied to funding and so will have no effect on the policy if Obama vetoes it.

House Speaker John Boehner ‘raised a lot of eyebrows’ when he revealed that he and McConnell have not spoken to each other in two weeks, even as Senate Democrats filibustered the House-passed DHS appropriations bill that blocks Obama’s 2012 and 2014 executive amnesty orders.

Reid said that Democrats won’t drop their filibuster of the DHS bill unless Boehner also agrees to pass the clean legislation.

“We have to make sure we get a bill to the president, not that we send a hot potato to Boehner, that doesn’t do the trick,” he told reporters Tuesday.

A group of House Republicans sent a letter urging Boehner to do no such thing, with some arguing during the conference meeting that they should be willing to stick with their current position past the Friday deadline, when DHS funding lapses, if the Senate cannot pass a bill.

“That’s unreasonable for Reid to demand that Boehner cave and us just take whole-hog whatever the Senate sends us,” says another GOP lawmaker. “If Boehner caves then we are going to have a grassroots revolt . . . If he just does what Reid says, then why the hell did we work to run the Senate? Literally, Reid is still running everything.”

Boehner told the Republican conference that he wanted to “keep all options on the table,” according to a lawmaker at the meeting.