Congress
Election season is almost here. Congress is rushing to legislate first.
As Republicans and Democrats prepare to battle each other for control of the House and Senate, they are also scrambling to pass legislative priorities that require working together — a tall order after months of bitter infighting.
Before members depart for a Memorial Day recess, the House GOP majority will try this week to ram through a party-line immigration enforcement package but also attempt to pass bipartisan housing affordability legislation and a bill that would revamp college athletics regulations.
Senate Republicans, when not moving the filibuster-skirting immigration bill through their own chamber, are also expected to be conferring with Democratic counterparts on bipartisan deals around a companion college athletics proposal and a framework for overhauling the federal permitting process for energy projects. There’s continued discussion on how to resolve differences on legislation that would fundamentally change how digital assets are regulated after the so-called Clarity Act advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee last week following House passage last summer.
And Rep. Jason Smith of House Ways and Means and Sen. Mike Lee of Senate Energy and Natural Resources, two of the most notoriously partisan committee chairs, struck conciliatory tones in recent days about their desire to work with Democrats on a framework for the taxation of cryptocurrency and streamlining energy permitting, respectively.
There’s also a desire for collaboration not just between the parties but between Republican-led chambers, too — a sentiment GOP senators shared with Speaker Mike Johnson last week when he crossed the Capitol to attend the Senate Republicans’ weekly closed-door luncheon.
“Let’s be working on things” was the message Senate Republicans conveyed to Johnson, according to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “Progress on things like that are good.”
Johnson, in an interview later, called the meeting “a great visit” where “we talked about how the two chambers can and should work closely together. We’re committed to that.”
Interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers revealed a genuine interest in making progress on long-stalled measures in the few short months before the home stretch of midterm campaigning begins. Members of both parties also see passing legislation as critical to combating a narrative with voters that Capitol Hill is mired in all-time political dysfunction and lack of productivity.
“I believe in bipartisan work,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). “But it has been my experience that the closer you get to an election, the harder it is to get that kind of work done.”
Despite the happy talk amid the rapidly closing window for legislative action, however, real challenges and a lack of trust remain. The latest curve ball: President Donald Trump’s social media post over the weekend proposing Republicans wedge a partisan election security bill into the pending housing affordability package or a reauthorization of a key spy authority.
Even before that demand, however, Johnson — who often finds himself trying to cater to his most conservative members to move bills on the House floor — wasthreatening to blow up bipartisan and bicameral negotiations on the housing bill, which the GOP sees as central to its midterm message on lowering costs for everyday Americans. The speaker has said he plans to put the measure on the floor this week and allow his members to vote on policy changes Senate Republicans and the White House warn they can’t accept.
Johnson is also negotiating changes to the college athletics bill known as the SCORE Act. That’s to appease hard-liners who have issues with provisions in the bill relating to scholarships for international students, among other things. Already, some tweaks were made to woo Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a former holdout.
“We don’t know the status of the overall bill. It really just depends on what Speaker Chip Roy says we can do,” quipped Rep. Shomari Figures of Alabama, one of the Democrats who has been working on the legislation that would set new standards for how college athletes are paid.
Trump has made it clear he wants to see passage of the SCORE Act, saying in recent months he’ll use his executive authority to enforce a set of rules surrounding eligibility, transfers and compensation in college sports that aim to protect college athletes.
Lawmakers also said in interviews this week that there are bipartisan talks underway about a reauthorization of a landmark public lands package known as the Great American Outdoors Act, a regulatory framework governing the use of artificial intelligenceand a bill to boost American manufacturing.
Smith, of Missouri, told attendeesof a tax conference Thursday that the Ways and Means panel can “do things on health care, trade and tax from a bipartisan perspective, and I intend to do that in the next few months.”
Lee, of Utah, in a recent interview said there was “a lot of shared interest” in a permitting deal and that lawmakers are exchanging drafts with hopes of releasing bill text in the coming weeks.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), meanwhile, emphasized there’s also a list of must-pass bills that can’t be ignored. That includes the government funding bills, the farm bill and a surface transportation bill.
The House passed its first appropriations bill last week to fund the Department of Veterans Affairs in an encouraging 400-15 vote, but other funding bills won’t be so easy. It also passed its version of the farm bill earlier in the month alongside a separate measure to allow year-round sales of a gasoline blend known as E15, which a Senate GOP aide last week called a “nonstarter.”
“All of them have to be done,” Lankford said. “This is not a ‘pick your favorite child.’ … Whatever we can get on first and get going, we need to get going on it.”
Mia McCarthy and Brian Faler contributed to this report.
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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