Congress
Capitol agenda: Senate says SALT isn’t settled
Pity Speaker Mike Johnson this morning.
Not only does he have to deal with Elon Musk trying to sabotage the “big, beautiful bill,” Johnson is now staring down Senate tax writers who are doubling down on threats to scale back his carefully negotiated deal to raise the state-and-local-tax deduction cap.
Senate Finance Republicans left the White House on Wednesday without decisions on key tax provisions in the bill. But two things are clear: Senators want to make President Donald Trump’s business tax incentives permanent, not just extend them for five years as the House did. And to help pay the roughly half-trillion-dollar price, they’re ready to carve up the House’s deal to quadruple the SALT deduction limit.
SALT Republicans don’t have the same leverage in the Senate that they do in the House — because they simply don’t exist in the other chamber.
“There’s not a single [Republican] senator from New York or New Jersey or California,” said Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). That means there’s not much appetite “to do $353 billion for states that, basically, the other states subsidize.”
But Senate Republicans are keenly aware of the House’s precarious math problem. If they send a package back to the House with significant SALT changes, it could derail the timeline for Trump’s biggest legislative priority.
“We are sensitive to the fact that, you know, the speaker has pretty narrow margins, and there’s only so much that he can do to keep his coalition together,” Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) told reporters. “At the same time it wouldn’t surprise people that the Senate would like to improve on their handiwork.”
Where’s Trump? The president on Wednesday didn’t directly tell lawmakers not to meddle with the House’s SALT deal. But he, too, is playing the numbers game. “He said, ‘You do this, do we lose three votes here? If you do that, do you lose three votes here?’” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters after the meeting.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune also conceded the difficult calculus on SALT, telling reporters “we understand that it’s about 51 and 218” and “we will work with our House counterparts and the White House” to move the megabill.
There’s been a breakthrough elsewhere, though: With Commerce preparing to release its draft bill Thursday, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told Blue Light News Wednesday that he’s satisfied a planned spectrum auction will protect national security, with specific frequencies used by the military shielded through 2034.
One potential wrinkle: Rounds later suggested to Blue Light News that the deal that was still being finalized Wednesday could look to free up other frequencies “that the business community is going to be concerned with.”
What else we’re watching:
— Appropriations moving: Speaker Johnson plans to meet Thursday with top GOP appropriators about what funding totals to use in drafting the dozen government funding bills they’ll write this summer. House Appropriations is forging ahead with markups Thursday on two of the 12 bills, even before GOP leaders and his dozen subcommittee chairs — “the cardinals” — have settled on numbers for the full slate.
— Senate Banking meeting: Senate Banking Republicans will propose provisions that would change the pay scale for Federal Reserve employees and zero out funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of the Senate version of the GOP megabill, according to a committee staff memo obtained by Blue Light News. Banking Republicans are scheduled to meet Thursday morning to discuss the proposal.
— Lutnick on Blue Light News (again): Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is back on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify in front of House Appropriations. Expect him to be back in the hot seat after Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) grilled him on Wednesday over the Trump administration’s tariffs.
Jasper Goodman, John Hendel and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) is jumping into the race to lead House education committee Democrats.
The Oregon Democrat officially declared she will run to be the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee in a Dear Colleague letter sent to members of the Democratic caucus Tuesday and shared with Blue Light News.
Bonamici’s jump into the race marks another challenger for Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the panel’s current ranking member. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) is also running for the panel’s top spot.
Bonamici wrote in the letter that she is “ready to bring a fresh and collaborative approach to invigorate this Committee with a plan to champion the education and labor priorities of our Caucus. With my legal background, I’m prepared to use all of the power of Congress to hold Trump and his cronies, including Secretary Linda McMahon, accountable for the harm they have caused.”
Bonamici introduced a resolution to impeach the Education secretary because of McMahon’s efforts to dismantle the department without the approval of Congress.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after Bonamici told POLITICO last month that she was not ruling out a run for committee leadership and was having conversations about it. Her leadership run now comes as Democrats believe they will win the House majority in November.
The Oregon Democrat, who currently serves as top Democrat on the K-12 subcommittee, said the whole panel “must provide a bold and visionary approach while fighting Trump’s corruption and assault on public education, unions, and working families” if they take the majority.
BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania — Speaker Mike Johnson defended President Donald Trump’s use of taxpayer funded political-themed ads ahead of the election, but he said it was “good” that MAGA Inc. would pay for them going forward.
Johnson said Tuesday that he’s only seen one of the Trump ads and that it “looked like a public service announcement.”
“It was talking about America’s greatness and the economy coming back, and it wasn’t a plea to vote for anybody. It was just — it was pro Americana,” Johnson told Blue Light News during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania.
But he added: “If the Super PAC’s funding them, that’s good.”
Trump said Monday that he or his aligned super PAC would pay for the series of taxpayer-funded ads featuring him in the final few weeks of the midterms. His decision came after bipartisan backlash, including from some GOP candidates like Brinker Harding in Nebraska’s 2nd District publicly broke with the president and said they shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer money.
Still, asked if Trump should refund taxpayers the money already spent on the ads, Johnson demurred. He said previous Democratic administrations have run PSAs as well, though Democrats argue these ads violate federal laws against using taxpayer money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.”
“Look, they’re making their decisions on funding campaigns and the content of all of it,” Johnson said of the president’s team.
“I’m going to tell you the president is deeply vested,” Johnson added, noting Trump was out on the campaign trail for Republicans.
Johnson spoke alongside Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) during a law enforcement event in the perennial bellwether of Pennsylvania’s 7th District. He called Mackenzie’s race one of the “top three in the country” and warned it would be “enormously expensive.”
He later argued that Democrats, if they win the House majority, would roll back GOP work on the economy and “empower our enemies around the world at the worst possible time.”
“That would roil the markets … if Democrats turned Congress into lawfare on steroids,” Johnson said.
Pennsylvania is the first of seven states that Johnson plans to visit this week as he continues his midterm campaign blitz.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said he plans to stay on the court through next year, brushing aside speculation that he could retire early and let President Donald Trump fill his seat after the election but before a new Congress is sworn in next year.
“I intend to stick around through this term,” Alito, 76, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “I made that decision many months ago.”
The Supreme Court began its new term on Monday, which will last through next June.
Alito, the second-oldest justice on the bench, was in the news last week after telling CBS News that he considered retiring this year and will do so again in 2027.
His comments come as the fight over control of the Senate is in a dead heat. Democrats would have to flip at least four seats, but recent polls show several races, including in states Trump carried easily two years ago, remain competitive.
Several Senate Democratic candidates are already running on the prospect of filling a seat on the Supreme Court or, at least, denying Trump’s ability to do so. Senate Republicans successfully blocked a Democratic nominee in 2016, allowing Trump to fill the seat after he came into the White House.
“Our race to decide Ohio’s next Senator could not only determine control of the U.S. Senate, but also who fills a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land,” Sherrod Brown, the Democratic nominee in Ohio, wrote in a blog post Monday. “Ohio’s next senator could be our first line of defense against another partisan Supreme Court Justice — or rubber stamp a Trump nominee.”
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