Congress

Capitol agenda: Johnson’s turn to deliver a health plan

Published

7 months ago

December 10, 2025

Get ready for the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse.

All signs are pointing in that direction as President Donald Trump refuses to endorse an extension and Senate Republicans coalesce behind a plan from Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would end the Obamacare tax credits and instead expand government-funded health savings accounts.

Now House Republicans are racing to prepare their own health care framework to vote on next week before leaving for the holidays — one that also likely would not extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies, which were supercharged as part of the Democrats’ 2021 pandemic relief package.

Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise will brief their conference Wednesday morning on all the options for this framework, which Scalise and relevant committee chairs helped craft.

“It won’t just be concepts we’re talking about … It’ll be very specific things that are available in bill format,” Scalise told reporters Tuesday, noting some provisions will reflect proposals that ultimately did not make it into the final GOP megabill over the summer. He said each piece will be presented individually “to see where the consensus is and let members decide.”

— Moderates sound the alarm: Many rank-and-file Republicans are still pushing for an extension, worried about voter backlash over the ensuing skyrocketing premiums. Even some Trump aides have advised that an extension would be politically prudent.

“We can agree that the current construct is flawed, but that letting them expire is not acceptable,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said in an interview Tuesday. “That doesn’t work.”

Fitzpatrick and Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) have been proposing their own blueprints that would include extensions. But neither has earned approval from GOP leaders, who are under pressure from conservatives who say the tax credits are rife with fraud and abuse.

Scalise didn’t rule out an extension Tuesday. Still, he said, “at the end of the day, we’ve got to do what the consensus of our members want to do.”

— Don’t rule out the discharge petition: While Republicans might not currently have the support in their conference to pass an extension, the Fitzpatrick and Kiggans plans have bipartisan backing. Fitzpatrick told Blue Light News last week he believes he has 218 votes for his bill and didn’t rule out filing a discharge petition to circumvent leadership and force a vote.

Some House Republicans told Blue Light News Tuesday they were even more inclined to back a discharge petition after Trump’s recent comments refusing to endorse an extension. That includes Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), who told reporters Tuesday he would support a discharge petition for either the Fitzpatrick or Kiggans proposal, if there were no other options.

“I respect the speaker tremendously, but I disagree with them on this,” Van Drew said. “We just can’t listen to a handful of people.”

— Eyes on the White House: The Trump administration has yet to provide clear guidance on what they want Congress to pass. But Tuesday night, Blue Light News saw James Braid and James Blair — the White House director of legislative affairs and deputy chief of staff, respectively — head into a meeting with House GOP leaders and committee chairs.

What else we’re watching:

— Dems blast Senate GOP health plan: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will host a news conference on health insurance premiums at 10:15 a.m. It comes a day after he criticized Senate Republicans’ health plan as “dead on arrival.”

— House votes on NDAA: The House is scheduled to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act Wednesday afternoon as a group of hard-liners weigh whether to hold up the bill over complaints it would give aid to Ukraine and wouldn’t include a central banking digital currency ban. The big question is whether Republicans will be able to adopt the procedural rule governing floor debate on the NDAA.

Meredith Lee Hill and Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report.

Congress

Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego

Published

1 hour ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”

The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”

But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”

Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”

He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”

Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.

“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.

Congress

Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran

Published

5 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top deputies of President Donald Trump will brief Congress on the Iran peace talks in a Monday conference call — the first time administration officials have addressed a broad group of lawmakers since Trump signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tehran earlier this month.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, will lead the briefing for all House and Senate members at 4 p.m., according to seven people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Republicans and Democrats have called for more transparency about the 14-point agreement inked on June 18, which initiated a cease-fire between the two countries. Since then, the U.S. and Iran have continued to engage in hostilities.

Congress

Capitol agenda: Red, white and GOP hard-liner blues

Published

7 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans finally cleared a runway this week to finish some of their top legislative priorities before the July 4 recess.

That is, unless a small band of hard-liners trip up those plans at takeoff.

Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to move quickly to pass fiscal 2027 appropriations legislation, the annual defense policy bill and a kids online safety bill that has been years in the making. The movement comes after President Donald Trump instructed GOP hard-liners to stop holding up a procedural vote amid a protest from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and others that the Senate hadn’t passed Trump’s election security bill.

But Luna and other hard-liners are still threatening to tank the procedural vote that could delay the defense policy bill and other measures until they get concessions on the SAVE America Act, amid other demands.

Johnson, for example, had also promised hard-liners a vote before July 4 on a sweeping GOP immigration bill introduced in the prior Congress as H.R. 2, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Johnson for his part has said the House will “pass the SAVE America Act again” by folding parts of it into a third party-line reconciliation bill. But the slimmed-down version he’d need to pursue in order to meet strict Senate rules for the budget process is already being panned by hard-liners as insufficient.

That reconciliation bill is also already delayed. House Republicans aren’t on track to meet their goal of advancing its framework before the July 4 recess as members on the Budget panel balked over how to pay for the legislation in a closed-door meeting last week.

“Time is of the essence, given how many legislative days we have,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, who is sponsoring the kids online safety legislation, said in an interview last week. “If we lose a week, that would be important.”

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership is grappling with their own heated internal divisions this week. Members are split over supporting the adoption of an amendment to a fiscal 2027 spending bill from Rep. Thomas Massie that would end Israel aid and cut the overall foreign military aid program by $3.3 billion.

Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro did not instruct her colleagues on how to vote during a rare Sunday evening caucus call, two sources granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting tell Mia and Riley. Leaders did, however, criticize the amendment as poorly written.

One other item this week that could split members of each party: House lawmakers are also slated to vote on a rewritten war powers resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib to reign in Trump administration military actions in Lebanon. Leadership worked with Tlaib to come up with new language last month that is expected to garner more Dem support, but the resolution is still expected to fail without GOP votes.

What else we’re watching:

— SENATE GOP GETS ANTSY ABOUT NOMINATIONS: Some Republican senators are unsettled by Trump’s apparent lack of urgency in filling vacant posts, even as GOP control of the chamber beyond the midterms is increasingly in doubt. There are more than two dozen federal court vacancies. Labor secretary, FDA commissioner and scores of other open positions do not have nominees, and a senior White House official said Trump is in no rush to fill them. “We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of Senate HELP, which oversees health, labor and other issues.

—RICK SCOTT SAYS HE’S JUST TRYING TO HELP: Fresh off his controversial Trump invite to a Senate GOP lunch last week, Sen. Rick Scott told Blue Light News in an interview he’s trying to make a mark — not trying to challenge Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Scott insists that neither his invitation to the president nor a letter he circulated afterward outlining how the Senate GOP should be preparing for the midterms should be seen as a prelude to a leadership challenge. The Florida Republican said he’s perfectly happy running the conference’s conservative Steering Committee and predicted Thune would easily secure another term as leader. What has become eminently clear in recent weeks is that Scott — after a long career in business, two terms as governor and nearly eight years as senator — just isn’t a back-bench kind of guy.

Meredith Lee Hill, Riley Rogerson, Alex Gangitano, Jordain Carney and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.