Congress

Donald Trump enters his lame duck era

Published

10 months ago

November 6, 2025

Hours after witnessing his party’s worst electoral drubbing in at least six years, President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans at the White House and demanded they ditch their chamber’s supermajority rules.

“If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” he told them over breakfast in the State Dining Room.

It was classic Trump dominance theater, like many other occasions this year where he successfully muscled recalcitrant Republicans to confirm controversial nominees, support divisive policies and enact sweeping domestic policy legislation.

But upon returning to the Capitol, the senators made it very clear: They planned to blow Trump off. One GOP senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, laughed out loud when asked about the anti-filibuster push.

Welcome to the dawn of Trump’s lame duck era.

Don’t expect an immediate stampede away from the president, according to interviews with GOP lawmakers and aides Wednesday — he remains overwhelmingly popular with GOP voters and is the party’s most dominant leader in a generation. Trump’s top political aide signaled Monday that the White House is not worried about a messy “family conversation” about the filibuster.

But with Tuesday’s stunning election losses crystallizing the risks to downballot Republicans in 2026 and beyond, there are growing signs that lawmakers are contending with the facts of their political lives: He’ll be gone in just over three years, while they’ll still be around.

The danger for the president is that if Trump can’t run roughshod over the thin GOP congressional majorities, it would leave him few legislative options given his scant interest in compromising with Democrats.

One Republican already liberated from reelection concerns openly vocalized frustrations Wednesday as Trump pushed for the end of the filibuster — something many in the GOP fear would backfire soon enough once Democrats regain power.

Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) called Democrats’ victory margins Tuesday “a red flag to the GOP” and blasted Trump’s refusal to engage with the other party.

“He has zero ability to work across the aisle,” he added. “He needs to face reality and learn how to talk to Democrats he can reason with.”

Other House Republicans more quietly aired frustration with Trump’s approach to the record 37-day shutdown, which headed into the end of the congressional workweek with no clear end in sight.

Many are privately signaling they’re prepared to break with Trump if he doesn’t allow Republicans to negotiate on an extension of the Obamacare insurance subsidies Democrats are demanding. Others blamed the president and his top budget aide, Russ Vought, for favoring hardball moves such as canceling blue-state transportation projects and firing federal employees that only served to cause Democrats to dig in further.

One irate senior House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly blamed Trump and Vought for spurring the shutdown with their unprecedented move to unilaterally rescind congressional funding over the summer through a so-called pocket rescission.

“That decision is why we’re in this mess,” the Republican said.

Democrats who on Wednesday finally found a bounce in their step after a year of infighting said it was no secret why Republicans were finally standing up to Trump over the filibuster after folding so many times before.

“Last night’s results look like a recipe for them to lose the House and the Senate next fall,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “And they’re going to hand us a 50-vote majority gift-wrapped when we show up Day 1?”

Trump on Wednesday night moved to buck up his faithful. “OUR MOVEMENT IS FAR FROM OVER — IN FACT, OUR FIGHT HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN!” he wrote in a Truth Social post with an upbeat video.

That followed a day on defense, where GOP leaders conspicuously split with Trump on the reasons for the stunning Republican losses.

Both Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune played down the Democratic victories, casting them as expected losses in blue states — never mind that the margins in New Jersey and Virginia far outstripped expectations and that Democrats also won big in Georgia, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Trump, on the other hand, told senators at the breakfast that the shutdown played a “big role” in the GOP losses. Asked about that assessment, Johnson replied, “I don’t think the loss last night was any reflection about Republicans at all.”

What GOP lawmakers do know is that there is a dramatic difference in their party’s performance in elections where Trump appears on the ballot versus the midterm and off-year contests where he’s not — no matter how many rallies he does or endorsements he doles out.

They also know, third-term musings of questionable constitutionality aside, Trump will never run for office again — which had many acknowledging that, if not fully reckoning with, the fact it might not be a great idea to hew so closely to Trump’s agenda.

“Trump drives turnout, and if he’s not on the ballot, the turnout is way down,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

Cornyn questioned whether the Tuesday elections “prove very much” and was one of the few GOP senators who said Wednesday he was newly open to considering changes to the filibuster after meeting with Trump. He could be considered the exception who proves the rule: Cornyn needs to stay in Trump’s good graces amid a fierce primary battle for reelection next year.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said voter dropoff in non-Trump years is “an issue for Republicans” and suggested the party should consider changing the filibuster to “do things that benefit the American public … secure the border, repair the damage done by Obamacare, transition to a system that works, secure elections.”

But with Thune making clear the Senate’s rules aren’t changing — “I just know where the math is on this issue,” the majority leader said — Johnson put the focus on GOP voter behavior.

“People need to understand: If you want to keep Trump’s agenda moving forward, you’ve got to come out in midterms,” he added.

Discussion has ramped up among senators about not only changing the filibuster but also trying to pass a new party-line reconciliation bill under the budget rules the GOP used to enact their megabill this summer. The suggestion came up at the White House breakfast, according to senators.

But there are huge obstacles to going down that road. The GOP still has a super-tight margin in the House, four senators can kill any party-line effort, Senate rules restrict what initiatives can be passed under budget rules and Republicans are far from united on what they would want to do with a reconciliation bill in the first place.

James Blair, political director for Trump’s 2024 campaign and the RNC who now serves as a deputy White House chief of staff, rejected the notion that lawmakers will treat Trump as a lame duck in an interview for Blue Light News’s “The Conversation.”

“I don’t think Republicans are going to do that at all,” he said. “The president, you know, sort of has his way of communicating, but the senators have their way, and it’s a family at the end of the day.”

Some GOP senators, he added, “have long relationships, and they hope somehow the Democrat fever will break one day. And I think the president’s view is, it’s not breaking.”

Dasha Burns, Mia McCarthy and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

College sports bill moves forward in Senate with Democratic support

Published

1 hour ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday voted with most Republicans after months of painstaking negotiations to help advance a sweeping college athletics bill.

An initial procedural vote on the measure led by Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) moved forward on a 74-24 vote, despite opposition on both sides of the aisle. The move tees up more floor debate and a final passage vote before lawmakers leave to campaign for the midterms.

Cantwell said that even though the bill wasn’t perfect, it would help ensure the name, image and likeness rights of student athletes, among other protections.

“I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the essential,” Cantwell said on the floor ahead of the vote. “This is the last best chance to save college sports and put HBCUs at the table where the future gets decided,” she said, referring to historically Black colleges and universities.

The chamber is expected to stay for the entirety of its planned three-week session now that senators opened a path to take up the bill, according to four Senate aides granted anonymity to discuss planning. Fast-tracking the legislation would depend on a deal between all 100 senators, which would require overcoming holdouts’ opposition.

Supporters of the bill behind the scenes have been fielding concerns from senators and a coalition of sports, civil rights and labor groups who’ve criticized the measure’s planned regulation of the multibillion-dollar industry.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) spent weeks trying to convince his colleagues to “step back and oppose” the bill in its current form, saying in a press conference with AFL-CIO this week it would “preserve a system of exploitation that is damaging our athletes.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who voted “no,” told reporters Tuesday the bill “falls way short.”

“It really jeopardizes college athletes’ health and safety. It gives broad-based antitrust exemption to the NCAA and gets very little back from it,” Booker added, referring to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “It is a bill that really, unfortunately, as one of the handful of college football players in this place, it does not cure what are some of the biggest things that are really threatening college players.”

Some Democrats who supported the bill, including New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, cited concerns from student athletes and coaches in their home states as the reason why.

“Student athletes and others wanted to make sure that the conferences that they were playing for were getting treated in a fair way,” he said. “Go talk to athletes from our schools and across the country and see what this means to them, not just athletes from the super conferences around America.”

The legislation has the backing of President Donald Trump, major sports conferences like the Big Ten and Southeastern, student sports organizations and HBCUs.

Several Republicans who were on the fence earlier about the bill, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), were convinced to support it after Cruz added language to clarify that it would not preempt state laws on transgender athletes’ participation on women’s sports teams.

Others Republicans like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said he couldn’t support advancing the measure because “there’s too much government involvement in it.”

Congress

Rebel Democrats again help House GOP advance floor agenda

Published

2 hours ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A pair of House Democrats voted to advance a slate of GOP bills in a procedural vote that was otherwise on track to fail — the second time they have crossed party lines to help out House GOP leaders in recent weeks.

Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine previously aided Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month when they voted to advance a “rule” resolution that teed up a Golden-authored measure aiding lobstermen. The move sparked outrage among many of their Democratic colleagues and created a touchy situation for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

But the dustup does not appear to have fazed Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez, who again joined with Republicans Tuesday to set up votes on bills that would hand President Donald Trump new authorities to sanction Russia’s trading partners as well as measures rolling back some EPA regulations.

The vote was 214-211, with two Republicans voting “no” — Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Several other Republicans, including Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania voted “yes” only after extended talks with House GOP leaders.

The last time House Republicans adopted a rule without help from Democrats was in July.

Speaker Mike Johnson, when asked about Democrats helping him adopt a rule twice this month, said he “would have gotten the votes.”

“You saw me work it there at the end,” Johnson said. “We would have had the votes necessary, but we had some discussion about other measures that people want to consider, so just worked through the process.”

After Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden voted with the GOP earlier this month, Jeffries promised a “serious response,” but he later indicted that there would be no public consequences following private conversations with the lawmakers. Golden is retiring after his term ends, and Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking reelection in a district won by Trump in 2024.

Harris announced before the vote that he was introducing a bill to tackle affordability by suspending the federal gas tax, suggesting he may have withheld his vote in a bid to secure floor consideration.

“Let’s put my bill on the floor and PASS IT,” Harris said in a post on X.

Congress

House panel recommends Leon Black be held in contempt for stonewalling Epstein investigation

Published

2 hours ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House Oversight Committee voted unanimously 41-0 Tuesday to recommend billionaire investor Leon Black be held in contempt of Congress for not fully cooperating with the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

It marks an escalation in an already contentious standoff, where Black defied two congressional subpoenas, refused to appear for a transcribed interview and then sued the committee for allegedly “overstep[ing] its authority.”

“Subpoenas are not suggestions. They carry the force of law and require full compliance,” said Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), later noting that Black gave the committee “no choice but to hold him in contempt” after ignoring the subpoenas.

Black has been a target of the committee’s Epstein probe for the personal and financial relationship he maintained with the late convicted sex trafficker, which included a $158 million payment not long after Epstein first became a registered sex offender.

He met with the committee in May for a transcribed interview but declined to speak at length about non-disclosure agreements he entered into with women tied to Epstein. As a result, the panel subpoenaed him to turn over those documents, to which Black responded by refusing to submit all those in his possession and then skipping a scheduled appearance before the panel slated for Sept. 3 — suing the committee instead.

Black’s lawyers, Susan Estrich and Aaron Cutler, in a statement before the votecalled for the House Oversight contempt vote to be postponed.

“This entire charade is about politics and ambition. Given our litigation against Chairman Comer and the Committee, the possible ethics violations by Chairman Comer, the false and potentially libelous and defamatory statements by Ranking Member Garcia, there are more than enough reasons to postpone this mark-up and contempt resolution,” the attorneys said.

The contempt resolution now heads to the full House, which also must vote on whether to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia for possible indictment.

Comer said it was now up to GOP leadership whether it would schedule the resolution for consideration before the House leaves at the end of the week for recess until after the midterms. A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately return a request for comment.