Congress
Capitol agenda: Trump faces a midterms reality check
President Donald Trump is heading into one of his most high-profile moments of the midterm year as he grapples with plunging public opinion and growing congressional dissent.
“It’s going to be a long one because we have so much to talk about,” Trump told reporters Monday.
Keep in mind: He already set the record last year with an hour-and-thirty-nine-minute SOTU address, so buckle in.
Here’s some of what to expect throughout the night:
— Tariff talk: Trump is likely to have words for the Supreme Court justices sitting right in front of him who last week ruled to overturn his sweeping tariff regime. The ruling represented a rare setback for Trump from the conservative high court.
It was especially significant as it becomes increasingly clear that Congress won’t be there to back up Trump, who could press for legislative action on tariffs Tuesday night. Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday it’s unlikely Congress will act to codify the president’s tariff agenda to comply with the ruling.
— DHS prognosis: The president could offer a hint at how long the partial government shutdown affecting Homeland Security agencies, now on Day 11, will last.
Democratic leaders, after a series of back-and-forth proposals with the White House, claim the administration isn’t serious about adopting stricter guardrails on federal immigration agents. The White House, meanwhile, signaled it was willing to play hardball by scaling back airport security operations in ways that could cause pain for travelers.
Watch to see if Trump provides more clarity on his negotiating position or simply takes aim at Democrats for challenging his immigration agenda.
— A midterm signal: Trump is facing abysmal approval ratings as he heads into midterm season, as voters increasingly disapprove of his handling of immigration, inflation and tariffs. But while the president walks into the House chamber Tuesday evening in a far weaker position than last year, he also has a huge opportunity to define his party’s campaign message.
Listen for Trump to define the direction of his final two years in the White House with an eye toward November. You can expect the embattled GOP lawmakers in the audience to be listening closely themselves as they grow more concerned about the public’s deteriorating view of his presidency.
“He is currently at his lowest point in the second term,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Washington. “The single most important variable in midterm elections is the president’s job approval.”
What else we’re watching:
— Dems split on SOTU attendance: Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will be in their seats for Trump’s SOTU address, but dozens of their members will be absent, with some attending alternative programming.
Some Democrats are instead sending Trump a pointed message with their guests of choice. Schumer, Jeffries and other Democrats have invited victims of Jeffrey Epstein to the building.
Others are bringing small business owners and Americans grappling with costly health care premiums since Congress failed to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies last year.
— House takes up aviation safety: A House and Senate fight over how to address the deadly January 2025 DCA crash is coming to a head Tuesday as Johnson attempts to muscle through the House floor a Senate-passed bill that some of his key committee chairs oppose.
— New housing bills incoming: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is unveiling legislation Tuesday morning that would limit the ability of large Wall Street investors to buy up homes — a policy goal that Trump is also pushing to include in Warren’s bipartisan housing bill with Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.).
Meanwhile, Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) are introducing legislation Tuesday that would allow federally-insured credit unions to access additional mortgage lending capacity through the Federal Home Loan Bank System.
Jordain Carney, Meredith Lee Hill, Eli Stokols, Hailey Fuchs, Robert King, Mia McCarthy, Sam Ogozalek, Oriana Pawlyk, Chris Marquette and Victoria Guida contributed to this report.
This time last week, the progressive and moderate wings of the House Democratic Caucus were gearing up to battle for influence in what they thought might be a slim governing majority. After surpassing expectations to win as many as 260 seats Tuesday night, members are showing signs of detente.
The results of the blowout midterm elections mean that House Democrats’ major ideological contingents will all swell in the next Congress. The centrist New Democrat Coalition is projecting at least 140 members, with the even more moderate Blue Dog Coalition grow to more than 20. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, meanwhile, is expected to have more than 100 members, six of whom identify as democratic socialists.
The prospect of having a 30-vote-minimum margin to pass legislation means no one group will come to the table with an obvious edge that would handcuff the likely incoming speaker, Hakeem Jeffries. If Democrats’ midterm gains had not been so pronounced, members might have more easily weaponized the narrow margins for their own political gains — by withholding their support for party-line bills, for instance, or opposing key procedural votes.
“There’s been so much attention throughout the course of this campaign, because of some really tough primaries that happened very early on in the primary season, about intraparty squabbles among Democrats,” Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, who runs the centrist New Democrat Coalition’s campaign arm, told reporters Wednesday.
“But what happened last night was a political earthquake,” he continued, “where the American people demanded that checks and balances be restored to government.”
That’s not to say that Democrats won’t disagree next year. The caucus won’t unite overnight on whether to advance Medicare for All or end aid to Israel, and the party infighting over emotionally fraught issues could get ugly. Both moderate and progressive members insisted in interviews and media calls Wednesday that their proposals are best suited to satisfy voter demands to lower costs and tackle corruption.
“I’ve always said that being a progressive just means you’re the first to the best and most just idea, and then everyone else runs to catch up with you,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, adding that it will be “the CPC [that] will continue to be a leading force in driving, accomplishing these ideas across the finish line.”
“Many of the policies [democratic socialists have] been championing just won’t hunt with the average Blue Dog and the district they represent,” said moderate Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who added there are “plenty of policy areas where we can find common ground.”
Buoyed by their massive new mandate, however, Democrats were starting to talk about a deliberative, consensus-building blueprint for governing that would not involve hard-line tactics like those deployed by House Republicans over the last two years. Thanks to the GOP’s razor-thin majority, just a few members had the power to wrestle control of the floor from leadership and derail legislative business for days.
Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a member of the New Dems, said there will be a broad imperative to accommodate Democrats’ “big tent” and give some deference to the members who helped build the new House majority in swing districts.
He added, “It’s a leadership challenge for all of us to make room for those folks to find those commonalities and overlap to develop relationships.”
Jeffries was leaning into consensus proposals at a news conference Wednesday morning. When asked about advancing policies like Medicare for All, he talked about legislation that the entire party backs — reversing Republican-led Medicaid cuts and extending enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits.
“We’ll have a family conversation when we get back, and certainly in the new Congress, about what’s the best way to do that beyond what we know we need to do immediately,” Jeffries said about health care.
The House will gavel back into session next week, and sitting Democrats will gather with incoming freshmen for orientation — an early opportunity for members from disparate ideological factions to find common ground. It could help that the next two years will be more about building a platform for 2028 rather than trying to actually pass laws given the likelihood of a presidential veto.
Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois last month said she and her progressive colleagues were coming up with a list of “non-negotiables” for a House Democratic majority platform. In an interview Wednesday she said the party’s vote cushion would work to progressives’ advantage: “There’s no excuse that we can’t, in fact, pass Medicare for All because we can’t put these three frontliners on the line.”
Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, the likely incoming chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and an ally of leadership, said in an interview Tuesday night as the polls were closing that he was optimistic Democrats would “compromise among ourselves for the benefit of the American people.”
“I think that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “That’s why I think that the candidates that turned red seats into blue seats, that’s why they ran.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune spoke Wednesday with President Donald Trump after the party’s sweeping losses Tuesday, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose the private discussion.
The conversation comes amid speculation in and out of the Capitol about whether Trump would publicly stand by Thune if the GOP lost its Senate majority. But so far Trump has stayed silent on Thune while telling reporters Wednesday he would stay out of the brewing House GOP leadership race.
Thune has long said he intends to run for another term as leader, and GOP senators believe he’ll keep the job. A spokesperson reiterated Wednesday he will run for leader in Tuesday’s closed-door election.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer launched his run for the minority whip job Wednesday in a letter to fellow Republican lawmakers, telling them, “There is no sugarcoating the failure we just experienced.”
“We lost, and I take that loss personally, both as a competitor and a member of this team,” the Minnesotan wrote about Tuesday’s results, adding, “We are down, but we are not out.”
Emmer, the No. 3 GOP leader since 2022, would rise to the No. 2 position if successful. He is expected to face Rep. August Pfluger, chair of the influential Republican Policy Committee.
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