Congress
How Mike Johnson doused a GOP dumpster fire
Speaker Mike Johnson bet it all on “one big, beautiful bill.” With a heavy assist from President Donald Trump in the final hours, he delivered.
The bill’s House passage early Thursday morning was at least temporary vindication for a series of strategic decisions championed by the Louisiana Republican — chiefly, that packaging a massive suite of tax cuts together with other sundry GOP priorities would make it easier to move ambitious legislation with his tiny governing majority.
Johnson had to battle for months with factions of his own conference, and with the Senate, at multiple key junctures. But he plowed through and moved a host of Trump’s campaign promises closer to the president’s desk after a final flurry of negotiations and a rare, overnight session on the House floor.
“There was a few moments over the last week when it looked like the thing might fall apart,” Johnson told reporters shortly after the vote, adding he visited the House chapel to pray on it.
In essence, Johnson spent months fighting fires. His job, in conjunction with other GOP leaders, was to manage flare-up after flare-up as various groups inside the House ranks battled over trillions in tax cuts and politically explosive reductions to social safety-net spending.
Johnson might not have succeeded in putting out every blaze, but he kept them from growing into a conflagration that even Trump couldn’t extinguish. He’ll probably have to do it again later this year after the Senate sends back revisions to the megabill.
The outlook for the legislation looked bleak throughout the past week, as various bands of holdouts resisted coming aboard.
On Wednesday night, for instance, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) — a conservative hard-liner — suggested the bill would potentially “have to fail” on the floor for leaders to realize it should be reworked. Moderate Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said he was “not happy” with changes the conservatives had secured to more quickly eliminate clean-energy tax credits he’d been working to defend.
Neither ended up voting for the bill. Davidson was one of two House Republicans who voted “no” Thursday, and Garbarino missed the vote.
But Johnson had spent the week peeling off almost every other member — moving methodically between holdout groups, patiently working through a seemingly endless litany of issues.
On Monday night, after tentatively approving some key demands from fiscal hawks who had delayed a key Budget Committee vote, Johnson faced ire from the other side of the conference in a closed-door meeting.
Several Republicans in the Main Street Caucus told Johnson they were frustrated that he was once again appearing to entertain politically explosive cuts to Medicaid — cutting the federal share of funding to states, known as FMAP — after the speaker had seemed to rule them out.
Some of the centrist-leaning Republicans in the room pressed the speaker to publicly take the proposal off the table for good this time — and send a message to the hard right not to push further.
Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a former Trump aide, spoke up to air his own irritation with how Johnson had managed the whole megabill process.
Indeed, the speaker and his team’s tactics had grated on many GOP members. They believed he had unwisely delayed settling the biggest battles until the final hours and had given disingenuous assurances to some at-risk Republicans that the Senate would intervene and block some of the bill’s most unpalatable provisions.
Johnson jotted down notes as members spoke. A few minutes later, as he walked back to his office, he told reporters, “FMAP has not been on the table — it’s been off the table for quite some time.”
He had extinguished another fire. But it was time for Johnson to call in backup.
The next morning, Trump made a rare journey to the drab, poorly-lit Capitol basement to make his wishes clear. It was uncertain if he’d stanch the disputes or toss more fuel onto them.
The visit came just a few days after the hard-liner rebellion had blocked the bill in the Budget Committee vote over concerns that the megabill would add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Before he even walked into the meeting, Trump appeared to be looking to stoke conflict — dismissing the hard-liners’ deeply held beliefs.
“I’m a bigger fiscal hawk — there’s nobody like me,” he told reporters alongside Johnson, in response to a question about some of the hard-right concerns.
Inside the meeting, the president took on a kind of Rodney Dangerfield persona, House Republicans said — telling barbed jokes at lawmakers’ expense.
He laced into the fiscal hawks and “SALT Republicans” pushing for the expansion of a key tax break — calling out “grandstanders” by name who sought to stand in the way of his “one big, beautiful bill.”
“He insulted several people with a great intensity,” said one bewildered House Republican, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private meetings and conversations.
Trump’s tongue lashings and Johnson’s hardball approach to muscling the bill through this week rattled some even long-time GOP lawmakers. It was clear there was no room for dissent.
“I could never have imagined when I started in politics that we would have this kind of a scenario,” one House Republican said of the our-way-or-the-highway approach. “But who else do we turn to, besides Johnson?”
Near the end, the speaker needed to douse one last blaze: The hard-line House Freedom Caucus was balking and pushing for concessions on Medicaid that other Republicans simply would not accept.
A White House meeting was arranged with the holdouts, and Johnson sat in with top lieutenants as Trump unleashed the fire hose — pressing Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Andy Harris of Maryland and other hard-liners to vote for the bill.
“It was tough. There was no back and forth,” said one Republican briefed on the meeting. “He let them have it.”
Johnson returned to the Capitol triumphant. “The plan is to move forward as we expected,” he told reporters.
Roy and Harris then huddled through the night with White House officials including Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and Legislative Affairs Director James Braid. The hard-liners pushed for, and said they secured, promises for executive orders to address Medicaid and other items on their wish list.
Meanwhile, as night turned to morning over the course of a nine-hour vote series, Johnson huddled one-on-one with several previously balking members on the floor.
Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas, a fiscal hawk who a few days earlier had said the bill “fell short,” spoke to Johnson around 3 a.m. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who won a key concession ending the taxation of gun silencers, sat with the speaker later in the morning.
And just before Republicans passed the massive bill a little before 7 a.m., the speaker and Miller spoke for several minutes, ending their conversation with a handshake.
Unlike several prior high-stakes votes during Johnson’s speakership and predecessor Kevin McCarthy’s, there were no dramatic scenes wrangling last-minute votes from the assembled hard-liners.
His team was confident the tough tactics had worked. “They always fold,” one senior GOP aide said.
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee said he’s not willing to “accept bad results” as a tradeoff for the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence — a direct rebuttal to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“As someone who practiced health care for 28 years, I’m never willing to accept bad results. I think we just need to do our best,” Rep. G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters Monday.
He was responding to Altman’s comments to Decoded by Blue Light News that people “should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Pressed further on whether he agreed with Altman’s premise, Thompson replied, “No, I think we have to work harder to prevent any bad things from happening.”
Altman’s comments come in the wake of increased panic over the risks of catastrophic destruction from AI, with many industry leaders and experts arguing that guardrails are needed on the technology to prevent it from spinning out of human control.
Pressure is building on Congress to regulate the rapidly-advancing technology, but lawmakers are divided over whether the AI industry needs federal regulation or if it’s capable of governing itself.
The executives of major AI labs and tech companies gathered at the White House last week to discuss solutions with President Donald Trump, who believes overregulating AI will have national security repercussions. The group ended up signing a “morally binding” AI accord that critics say won’t do enough to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Thompson noted Monday he believes that AI will bring “tremendous solutions,” specifically in regards to finding cures for health issues like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But he also said AI has to be led with “principle” — comparing it to how he addressed digital assets in a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, which he worked on as chair of the Agriculture Committee.
“The first principle is ‘do no harm.’ So we need to protect consumers, and that means, I think, building some guardrails — some guidelines — to do that,” Thompson said. He added that the second principle is to “foster innovation.”
“I think AI has a lot to do with that,” he added. “I don’t think AI works without RI: Real Intelligence.”
LE SUEUR, Minnesota — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is no “consensus” yet on advancing a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time even as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Republicans to pass it.
Thune addressed the matter in a Monday interview after Trump used his Truth Social account multiple times over the weekend to rail against the legislation, known as the Sunshine Protection Act — going so far as to post the personal cell phone number of one of its GOP opponents, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“The president feels strongly on it like he does a lot of issues,” he said. “It’s something we’re having conversations about but there’s no clear path forward or consensus on it yet.”
While Trump singled out Cotton for scrutiny, Thune made clear the opposition to the permanent daylight saving time proposal — which would lead to very late winter sunrises in some parts of the country — ran deeper than one senator.
Cotton has publicly voiced opposition to the proposal for year, citing, among other things, the fact that children in his state would be going to school in the dark for part of the year.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voiced similar objections Monday to reporters in the Capitol, saying he was mindful of “safety concerns in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus in very early hours.”
Thune, who spoke during a campaign swing in Minnesota with GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya, has himself opposed previous daylight saving bills. He said Monday that “a lot of it depends on where you are in the country” and that “your geography probably has as much to do with your position on that as anything.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has aligned himself closely with Trump, is among the lawmakers who have been pushing to get the bill through the Senate. He recently told POLITICO, “I’m going to make sure it gets passed this year.”
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Democrats have pulled back some of their ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, days after the top Senate Republican super PAC paused its future spending in the state.
WinSenate, a group affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, has removed roughly $1.1 million in North Carolina ad buys this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The group still has roughly $18.8 million in future reservations through Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing this race through to victory, and will continue to make spending decisions based on how to best build a strong Senate majority,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.
The move, combined with the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund’s decision to pause future spending, are a signal that both parties are shifting resources amid an ever-expanding Senate map. Democrats are increasingly confident in their North Carolina Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, as he continues to hold a sizable lead in public polling over Republican Michael Whatley — but some privately say states like Michigan and New Hampshire need more resources.
Meanwhile, multiple Republican groups, not just SLF, have retreated from the state in recent weeks, effectively deciding that it’s no longer worth the money to boost Whatley’s campaign.
The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action left North Carolina off its $22 million list of future spending across key Senate contests, and Old North Action removed $6.5 million in ad reservations last month.
The Cooper campaign, however, is still treating the race as competitive, pointing to North Carolina’s closely divided electorate and the fact that President Donald Trump won the state in each of the past three presidential elections.
“North Carolina is a truly 50/50 state and Democrats haven’t won a US Senate race in 18 years. We can’t take anything for granted or our eye off the ball,” said Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to the Cooper campaign. “DC is broken and we’re going to continue to run this race like we’re ten points down to ensure North Carolinians get the change they desperately need.”
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