Congress
Capitol agenda: Congress leaves health mess for January
Congress is about to leave town for the holidays — and put off their health care troubles until January.
The House and Senate will take their last votes of the year Thursday, officially allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire Dec. 31. The House passed its GOP-led health care package Wednesday night, though the Senate has no plans to take it up.
Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to work “much more” on health care in the new year, after moderate Republicans joined a Democrat-led discharge petition for a clean three-year extension of the subsidies. Johnson said “it’s inevitable” that the discharge petition comes up after lawmakers return.
“We’ll deal with it in January,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Wednesday. “These things take a lot of twists and turns. Just this week, we’ve had a lot of twists and turns.”
The Democrats’ discharge petition is a shell bill, which means lawmakers could add Senate-passed language to it — though it’s not clear what could reach 60 votes in the Senate. GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said the plan for now is to send the clean three-year extension.
Meanwhile, moderate rank-and-file members in both chambers are trying to come up with a last-minute consensus plan that could pass the House and Senate. But nothing could come together until January, when Congress will have less than a month until the next funding cliff.
At the center of these health care talks is Fitzpatrick, who is working behind the scenes to get an ACA fix even after the subsidy expiration date.
“I think it’s a mistake,” Fitzpatrick told Blue Light News of allowing the credits to lapse. “I’m going to exhaust every single option I have to get this done.”
It’s unclear if they can pull it off. The lawmakers already failed to secure an extension before the expiration date — it’ll be much harder to revive them after.
In the meantime: Interest groups on both sides are diving furiously into the blame game over the subsidies lapse. It’s an early test of the messaging battle over health care — an issue that could define the 2026 midterms.
What else we’re watching:
— Appropriations movement: Senate GOP leaders have won over all the Republicans who objected to moving a five-bill package of government funding measures this week. Now it’s Democrats’ turn to check for holds on their side for the “minibus,” which contains the Labor-HHS-Education, Defense, Transportation-HUD, Commerce-Justice-Science and Interior-Environment bills.
— Stock trading talks: Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) expect to meet with Johnson Thursday to discuss a ban on congressional stock trading. So far, their discharge petition is nowhere close to the 218 signees necessary to force a vote in the House.
— A fight over broadband money: Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) will introduce a bill Thursday that would give states access to an estimated $20 to $22 billion in broadband deployment funding — a proposal at odds with efforts from Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) that would claw back the funding entirely.
Benjamin Guggenheim, Meredith Lee Hill, Nicholas Wu, Amanda Chu, Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misidentified Ted Cruz’s state affiliation.
A top pollster for President Donald Trump is pushing back on recent public polling showing Republican Mike Rogers trailing progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the marquee Michigan Senate race.
Tony Fabrizio, who is conducting polling for Rogers, says the polls released this month are over-sampling Democratic-leaning voters, specifically college-educated and Black voters, according to an internal memo obtained by Blue Light News. A Susquehanna poll released this month showed El-Sayed leading by seven points and a TIPP poll showed him leading by four points.
El-Sayed’s lead in those polls is a “fake narrative,” Fabrizio wrote. His polling for AARP — conducted alongside Democratic firm Impact Research — showed the race essentially tied.
The warning follows huge polling misses in the Democratic primaries in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, which he wrote were “some of the most egregious examples of public polling failures in recent memory.” It’s also a sign that Republicans are wary of the string of bad polling numbers for Rogers in the race, which is crucial for determining control of the chamber.
Jim Lee, CEO of Susquehanna Polling and Research, told Blue Light News that the firm did not oversample any demographics. “I think their head is in the sand,” Lee said, noting in part what he said was a gap in enthusiasm between Democratic and Republican voters this cycle.
TIPP didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fabrizio, in the memo, argued on the Susquehanna poll: “50% of the sample in this survey is college-educated – making them massively overrepresented to what they should be. We took a look at 2022 and 2024 Exit Polls and VoteCast data and, as shown below, there is no indication that the Michigan electorate will be anywhere near 50% college-educated. In fact, it is unlikely they will be even 40% college-educated.”
He also noted “a huge gap” between college-educated and non-college educated voters.
“This was the driving issue of the public polling misses for President Trump in 2016 and 2024, especially in the Upper Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin,” Fabrizio added. “By increasing college-educated voters by 10+ points, and thus decreasing non-college educated voters by the same, we can pretty much guarantee this poll is significantly overestimating El-Sayed’s vote share.”
President Donald Trump and hemp industry lobbyists are hoping to win a final vote on Capitol Hill next week to skirt a ban on intoxicating products — with shutdown politics as leverage.
Nine months ago, Congress cleared a bill to close a loophole created in 2018 that allowed the sale of some hemp-derived products containing types of THC colloquially known as “diet weed.” That ban is supposed to take effect in mid-November, or roughly 11 weeks, to limit overall THC levels in hemp products that can get people high — including gummies, canned drinks, pills and vapes.
But Trump and industry leaders successfully lobbied Senate leaders to add language to a government funding patch earlier this month to delay the ban until mid-December, with the administration promising instead to finalize regulations cracking down on how the products are made and sold.
Now House Republican leaders are aiming to clear that bill for Trump’s signature early next week, according to three people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. And many GOP lawmakers are not pleased at the prospect of being rolled.
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) told reporters last week that he expected House lawmakers would “iron out” some “sticking points” with the Senate-passed funding bill, “particularly the hemp issue,” rather than pass the legislation without changes — which appears to be GOP leadership’s current plan.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) was more blunt: “it is morally reprehensible to threaten a shutdown over a loophole Congress agreed to close to less than a year ago,” he said in a statement Thursday.
Yet despite fierce pushback from lawmakers warning that the intoxicating products are harming Americans, hemp industry leaders are preparing for a victory, betting members of Congress ultimately care more about swiftly passing legislation to avert a Sept. 30 government shutdown before the midterms.
“Any effort to try to shut down the government — over a one-month delay on a hemp issue — I don’t think is going to fly well with most members of Congress,” Jonathan Miller, a top lawyer for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable advocacy group, said in an interview this week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its plans for imposing new rules on hemp products in the coming months. But the Trump administration is expected to need more time than mid-December to finalize regulations, so hemp industry representatives are discussing a “regulatory bridge” that would impose temporary rules while continuing to avoid a full ban, according to Miller.
That could include restricting purchase to adults age 21 and older, blocking imports from China, mandating certain manufacturing practices, cracking down on copycat products that look like popular candy or potato chips and requiring transparency in product labeling.
While lawmakers have been back home over their summer break, hemp industry leaders have fanned out across the country to make their case for this plan. “The hemp industry does not have an August recess,” Christopher Lackner, head of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, said in an interview this month of the group’s work to facilitate passage of the Senate-passed funding bill.
Trump administration officials have also been telling reluctant lawmakers they will use the one-month delay to work on regulations. “The White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in an interview this month.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who fought in the Senate to retain the ban as originally intended, said White House officials have said “they don’t want another extension, and I agree with that.”
In a statement, Ricketts said that “manufactured high-THC products like gummies and drinks are putting our kids in the hospital” and need to be taken “off our shelves.”
Some supporters of the ban say the White House and industry are just employing delay tactics to get to December, when lawmakers will face another pressure campaign to delay the ban while they are motivated to avert a shutdown before leaving town for the holidays.
“What they’re really after is to try to jam this on some must-pass, end-of-the-year funding,” Budd told reporters earlier this month. “That’s really what this is about.”
Budd fought to block the delay in the Senate as part of the government funding measure, but his amendment to that end was shot down 61-32 before the chamberpassed the legislation, sending it on for House action.
Trump personally called Budd after the senator filed the amendment and talked about creating federal regulations for hemp products, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion.
Days later, Budd demanded a vote on the amendment anyway and continues to slam the hemp industry.
“It is clear that businesses that sell unregulated, intoxicating products will stop at nothing to protect their bottom line, even at the expense of children’s health and safety,” he said in a statement this week.
Besides lawmakers fighting to ban intoxicating hemp products, others are pushing alongside the White House and industry for federal regulations.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-W.Va.) has crafted legislation that would direct the Food and Drug Administration to create federal rules for intoxicating hemp products and wants to see mandates for third-party testing, as well as new THC limits per serving.
Griffith told reporters Thursday the “deadline push” in the Senate-passed government funding measure “is not long enough” to finalize necessary regulations.
Since state limits for THC vary widely throughout the country and the federal government has taken years to step in since the hemp loophole was created in 2018, Griffith argued it makes more sense to regulate the intoxicating products than to enact a federal ban.
“That horse is out of the barn,” he said. “What we need to do is corral it.”
Kelsey Brugger, Amanda Friedman and Rachel Shin contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump’s $400-million super PAC is taking its first steps into the general election: hosting a public event in battleground Michigan, headlined by Vice President JD Vance.
Battleground Republicans have been clamoring for Trump’s MAGA Inc. to spend in competitive races. The Michigan event is an early indicator of how the massive group might seek to use its funds to help the party keep control of Washington.
Vance will be joined in Sterling, Michigan, on Monday by GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers, 10th District nominee Mike Bouchard Jr. and gubernatorial nominee John James, along with several other Michigan Republicans, according to an event advisory from MAGA Inc.
The GOP sees Michigan’s open seat as its best Senate pickup target this fall as Rogers faces former public health leader and progressive Abdul El-Sayed, who emerged from a grueling primary earlier this month.
“MAGA Inc. will be hosting events throughout the nation to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress in order to finish cleaning up the mess the Biden-Harris-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats left,” said Alex Pfeiffer, spokesperson for MAGA Inc. “We’re not going back to their record inflation, open borders, and surging crime.”
MAGA Inc. is sitting on more funds than any other super PAC, and Republican donors and battleground candidates have been hoping it will unleash that money to help the party keep control of the House and Senate.
So far, the group has only spent only a few million dollars out of its massive fundraising haul, and its funds have largely gone to competitive Republican primaries. Most recently, it spent $827,000 on phone calls and text messages to boost Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the state’s special primary.
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