Congress
Capitol agenda: Johnson tries to clean up Trump’s Hill mess
President Donald Trump’s obsession with the SAVE America Act has hurled Congress into indefinite gridlock.
Senators are gone until July 13 after starting their Independence Day recess a few days early.
Now House Republican lawmakers are looking toward Speaker Mike Johnson, who will Thursday head to the White House to try to convince the president to salvage the GOP’s legislative agenda.
The president’s insistence Congress pass the controversial election security legislation has ground both chambers to a halt.
The deadlock threatens to derail a host of other legislative efforts Republicans and the White House hoped to complete in the coming weeks, including a sweeping reconciliation bill filled with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in Iran war military funding, billions of dollars in relief for farmers, fiscal 2027 funding bills and the annual defense policy bill.
“I’d like to celebrate victories, not come up with reasons why we failed,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said in an interview, joining other Republicans in venting frustration after Trump scrapped a planned signing of a major housing affordability bill Wednesday.
“We’ve demonstrated a lot of dysfunction lately,” he said.
Wednesday’s explosive lunch with Trump and GOP senators probably didn’t help.
“The president came to the Capitol to do what he thinks Senate Republican leadership can’t do: flip votes on SAVE and nuking the filibuster,” a senior Senate GOP aide told Jordain.
“He left with the same number of votes that existed when he arrived — possibly fewer.”
Now eyes are on Johnson, who has lost control of the floor as hard-liners demand the Senate pass the elections overhaul.
He’s keeping the House in session ahead of his 2 p.m. Trump meeting in hopes of salvaging plans to put several bills on the floor this week — including a pair of fiscal 2027 spending measures.
But if Johnson and Trump can’t reach a compromise, GOP leadership may cancel all votes for the remainder of the week and next week, too.
That would further imperil their plans for another party-line reconciliation bill and the $88 billion supplement funding request the White House transmitted Wednesday.
What else we’re watching:
— JOHNSON’S PITCH FOR RECON 3.0 FALLS SHORT: House GOP leaders are trying to make good on their promise to advance a long-shot, party-line package of conservative priorities by arguing it’s the only chance to pass pieces of Trump’s doomed elections bill. So far, their pitch is falling short. Members who attended a meeting with House Budget Republicans Wednesday argued the REAL ID grant program Johnson proposed was no substitute for enacting the full SAVE America Act. And fiscal hawks on the panel warned they would oppose any budget resolution unless it’s paid for on a yearly basis, and without budgeting gimmicks.
— TRUMP’S $88B ASK FOR IRAN WAR, FARM AID: The White House sent Congress Wednesday a much-awaited request for emergency funding to cover military operations in Iran, farm assistance and disaster assistance. But the proposal could complicate House Republicans’ pursuit of a third party-line spending package, which was supposed to be centered around $350 billion in defense funding that Democrats wouldn’t support. The request for tens of billions of dollars in extra war spending comes as the House Appropriations panel Wednesday advanced a $1.1 trillion base budget plan for the Pentagon. Taken together, the three efforts represent a record-breaking roughly $1.5 trillion military budget, about a 50 percent hike from this year’s level.
Jordain Carney, Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, Connor O’Brien and Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.