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Robert Garcia elected to lead House Oversight Democrats

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California Rep. Robert Garcia will be the next top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee after beating Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch in a 150-63 caucus vote Tuesday.

Garcia, 47, won a first-ballot majority after winning the backing of the caucus’ powerful Steering and Policy Committee Monday evening.

Serving just his second term in Congress, Garcia has quickly risen through the ranks. He’s currently a member of Democratic Caucus leadership and served as a co-chair of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.

In a contest that had tested House Democrats’ desire to set aside its penchant to reward seniority in favor of promoting younger voices, Garcia had pitched himself to his colleagues as a consensus candidate with managerial experience as a former mayor of Long Beach.

In a previous interview with POLITICO, he called it “premature” to impeach President Donald Trump without buy-in from other Democrats — a contrast with other young progressives who have sought to kick-start the process. And he’s emphasized that the committee under his leadership would do more than probe the Trump administration.

Democrats have been maneuvering for the top Oversight job since April, when Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly announced he would step aside from the job amid a battle with cancer. He died in May at 75.

For weeks, the race pitted two senior Democrats — Lynch, 70, and Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume, 76 — against two insurgent young progressives — Garcia and Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, 44. Crockett and Mfume dropped out of the race Tuesday after falling short in the Steering test vote.

“If you are going to be in leadership, you need to know that you have a team that is ready and willing to work with you,” Crockett told reporters Tuesday. “It was clear by the numbers that my style of leadership is not exactly what [Democrats] were looking for, and so I didn’t think that it was fair for me to push forward and try to rebuke that.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision not to run a second time for the Oversight post and to instead stay on the Energy and Commerce Committee helped open up the field.

Connolly’s race last year against the 35-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was similarly seen as a generational challenge within the caucus. But senior Democrats — including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — lined up behind Connolly, quashing efforts for a changing of the party’s old guard.

This time, the party’s elders were split in the race. Pelosi never endorsed Garcia, but she had met with her fellow Californian as the contest ramped up and was widely seen in the caucus as a Garcia ally.

“I’m a Californian,” she said as the voting was underway Tuesday. “I’m partial to mayors.”

Some of the most powerful blocs in the party opted to remain on the sidelines. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus endorsed Garcia, who was the sole Latino candidate in the race and will be one of two Latino committee leaders along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez. But groups like the Congressional Black Caucus, New Democrat Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus did not make endorsements.

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Congress

Rep. Dusty Johnson to announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday

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Rep. Dusty Johnson will announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday, according to two people granted anonymity to speak about private conversations.

Johnson has served as South Dakota’s sole House representative since 2019. He’s been a key player in major deals on Capitol Hill in recent years as the head of the Main Street Caucus of Republicans.

Johnson, long expected to mount a bid for higher office, will make the announcement in Sioux Falls.

Johnson is the eighth House Republican to announce a run for higher office in 2026. Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Byron Donalds of Florida, Randy Feenstra of Iowa, John James of Michigan and John Rose of Tennessee are also seeking governor’s offices; Reps. Andy Barr of Kentucky and Buddy Carter of Georgia have announced Senate runs.

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Senate slated to take first vote on megabill Saturday

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Senate Republicans are planning to take an initial vote at noon on Saturday to take up the megabill.

Leadership laid out the timeline during a closed-door lunch on Friday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said after the lunch. A person granted anonymity to discuss internal scheduling confirmed the noon timeline but cautioned Republicans haven’t locked in the schedule yet.

During the lunch, Speaker Mike Johnson pitched Senate Republicans on the tentative SALT deal, according to three people in the room. He said the deal was as good as Republican can get, according to the people.

Johnson noted he still has “one holdout” — an apparent reference to New York Republican Nick LaLota, who said in a brief interview Friday that if there was a deal, he was not part of it.

Leaving the meeting, Johnson was asked by reporters whether he thought Senate Republicans would accept the SALT deal. “I believe they will,” he replied. “They’re going to digest the final calculations, but I think we’re very, very close to closing that issue.”

In the meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Johnson laid out details of the fragile agreement, telling Senate Republicans the House SALT deal would be cut in half, to total roughly $192 billion. They restated it would raise the SALT cap to $40,000 for five years under the current House-negotiated SALT deal, and snap back to the current $10,000 cap after that.

In related matters, Kennedy and Hoeven also said the Senate will keep its provider tax proposal but delay its implementation, which Republicans believe will help it comply with budget rules. and Johnson also told Senate Republicans that he wants to do another reconciliation bill — which senators took to mean they would get another opportunity to secure spending cuts or provisions passed that have been squeezed out of the megabill.

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Trump says July 4 is “not the end all”

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President Donald Trump on Friday backed off the July 4 deadline he set for Congress to pass his megabill, acknowledging that the timing could slip as Republicans work through a series of political and logistical hurdles.

“It’s not the end all,” Trump said of the self-imposed Independence Day goal. “It can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time if possible.”

The remarks represented a clear softening of the White House’s position from just a day earlier, when Trump administration officials insisted that the GOP lawmakers pass the domestic policy package within a week despite a series of fresh obstacles.

Senate Republican leaders are still struggling to lock down the necessary 51 votes for the bill, amid objections from competing factions over the depth of the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.

The effort has also been hamstrung by a flurry of adverse rulings by the Senate parliamentarian that are now forcing lawmakers to rewrite significant portions of the bill.

The president indicated that he has little interest as of now in trying to directly overrule or even fire the parliamentarian — a step that some close allies in Congress had called for after she disqualified several of the bill’s provisions.

“The parliamentarian’s been a little difficult,” Trump said. “I disagree with the parliamentarian on some things, and on other ways she’s been fine.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed those issues on Thursday, saying Trump still expected Republicans to coalesce in the coming days and put the bill on his desk by July 4.

But asked directly on Friday, Trump took a more ambivalent stance.

“We have a lot of committed people and they feel strongly about a subject, subjects that you’re not even thinking about that are important to Republicans,” he said, appearing to reference the policy divisions within the Senate GOP conference.

Trump also singled out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for praise despite his resistance to the bill, complaining instead about the lack of Democratic votes.

“The problem we have is it’s a great bill, it’s a popular bill,” Trump said. “But we’ll get no Democrats.”

If all Republicans vote for the bill, it would not need Democrats’ support to pass.

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