Congress
‘It’s going to be a circus’: Inside Mike Johnson’s grueling week’
Welcome to another grueling week in the House.
A growing list of deadlines is bearing down on Speaker Mike Johnson as House Republicans try to push through an extension of an expiring government spy power Tuesday, a budget plan to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown Wednesday and a farm bill many members say is key to midterm victories Thursday.
Each legislative undertaking is deeply complicated and rife with intraparty warfare — from a MAHA revolt over the farm bill to a rebellion from ultraconservatives who blocked Johnson’s last bid to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and could do so again.
Johnson is also facing a rebellion from his rank-and-file all the way up to some of his senior members over his plan to move ahead with the budget resolution the Senate advanced last week that would only address immigration enforcement funding. Hard-liners insist they need a comprehensive follow-up to last summer’s tax and spending megabill to help them stave off massive losses in the November elections.
Hanging over it all are the events of this past weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner, where a gunman fired shots near a ballroom where the president, vice president, the Speaker of the House and Cabinet officials in the line of presidential succession were all dining.
It’s not clear yet how it will affect negotiations around extending Section 702 or passing an immigration funding bill by April 30 and June 1, respectively, but lawmakers late Saturday night and the weekend said it underscored the need to quickly reopen DHS, which houses the Secret Service.
The speaker will need nearly every Republican to advance all three of these critical items that hold enormous political and policy consequences; none are guaranteed to survive the week.
“It’s going to be a circus,” one Republican said.
“The week from hell,” another added.
GOP leaders are already losing precious floor time Tuesday when King Charles III, who is in town for a state visit at the White House, will address a joint session, forcing leaders to cut off House votes by noon, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. Republican leaders are now in further talks surrounding security protocols for the royal visit, which could result in additional delays for the House GOP early in the week.
This week will also mark 60 days since the start of the conflict with Iran, and some Republicans are growing anxious over the economic uncertainty it has wrought, especially concerning energy prices. This is the time, some GOP lawmakers have warned, they could break rank and vote with Democrats on legislation to rein in Trump’s military authority overseas, though, many Republicans are pointing to the ceasefire — though tenuous — as a reason to continue opposing war powers resolutions for the time being.
And in another blow, Johnson is down one GOP vote as Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) has been away from Capitol Hill since March 5, with little more explanation than his team saying he’s dealing with a personal health matter.
AfterPOLITICO reported that New Jersey House Republicans have called and texted Kean, only to get “radio silence,” Johnson released a statement late last week saying he spoke “by phone” with Kean last Thursday. He added: “He is attending to a personal health matter and expects to be back to 100% very soon.”
Perhaps the biggest political landmine for Johnson will be the budget resolution needed to allow Republicans to write and pass a filibuster-skirting reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement activities under DHS. Trump is demanding such a bill on his desk in a little over a month, at which point the House is expected to finally pass a bipartisan measure funding all other DHS operations and end the record-setting shutdown.
But Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio and other Republicans have warned the budget resolution will fail on the floor if Johnson pushes ahead with the narrow Senate plan rather than a more expansive policy package. Republican leadership needs to convince these members to go along with the Senate budget plan for immigration funding now — by promising to move another partisan package of other GOP priorities later.
“We will not get a third reconciliation bill,” Davidson said in a statement. “We need to use reconciliation 2.0 to deliver the full agenda the American people sent us to accomplish. The train is leaving the station, and we need to load it up.”
Leaders plan to discuss the matter in closed-door meetings throughout the week, conference-wide and in smaller groups. The speaker will also try to put some more meat on the bones of general ideas Republicans could pursue in a later party-line package during the weekly House GOP conference meeting Tuesday, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Changes to the blueprint, Johnson and his allies caution, would punt the measure back to the Senate and almost certainly cause Republicans to miss Trump’s deadline. The White House and Homeland Secretary Secretary Markwayne Mullin are warning the administration is running out of money to pay a swath of DHS employees, increasing the urgency to move quickly.
Some senior House Republicans believe the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner could spur some GOP lawmakers to put aside their various gripes and support the budget resolution now, recognizing national security risks without a fully operational DHS, according to three people granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“I think Congress should pass DHS funding — it needs to be everything,” said Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) in an interview Sunday. “I think it’s going to be a much higher priority.”
Many Republicans said the events of Saturday night should prompt Democrats to end the impasse over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda and just vote to reopen all agency operations without conditions. Democratic leaders were signaling Sunday their calculus hadn’t changed, however, underscoring the need for Republicans to pursue a party-line approach to immigration funding if other department functions stand a chance of coming back online in the coming weeks.
The Secret Service is still getting paid through emergency funding, lowering that pressure point for now.
The Saturday shooting also has had the adverse effect of ginning up enthusiasm among hard-liners to expand the pending budget resolution to allow construction of the White House ballroom to proceed despite legal challenges, with members arguing increased political violence necessitates a secure place for elected officials to gather safely.
“Any consideration of DHS reconciliation instructions this week & beyond should provide for construction of a secure ballroom on White House grounds,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted on social media.
Budget Chair Jodey Arrington, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Rep. August Pfluger — who helms the Republican Study Committee of 189 Republicans — spent last week agitating for broadening out the upcoming party-line package beyond just stalled immigration funding. They all stood up during a closed-door conference meeting last week to make their case, according to four people granted anonymity to share details of the discussion.
Then there’s legislation to renew section 702 in time to both meet the expiration deadline and give the Senate time to clear it for Trump’s signature.
Johnson unveiled a reworked, three-year extension late last week but he has to sell it to a group of House Freedom Caucus members who want guardrails on the government’s warrantless surveillance practices. Many hard-liners are still not backing down from demands that leadership agree to advance a ban on a central bank digital currency as part of a reauthorization.
And finally there’s the farm bill. Activists with the Make America Healthy Again movement — a coalition that helped President Donald Trump win the presidency in 2024 — say they’ve been betrayed by the GOP over a provision in the legislation that would shield pesticide makers from lawsuits.
Some Republican lawmakers are so angry about the leadership-sanctioned plan that they’re now working with a group of House Democrats to strip out the provision or kill the whole bill, according to four people involved in the conversations.
Farm state Republicans, who are aligned with the powerful pesticide industry, don’t think the pushback will be successful; they argue the farm bill simply clarifies labeling rules and national standards for popular pesticides and herbicides used by the agriculture sector. But threats from the opposition could present a major headache and draw attention to larger party dysfunction.
Several conservatives are privately warning they could take down the farm bill and Johnson’s DHS funding plans if he tries to steamroll them on a Section 702 extension that relies on some bipartisan support.
“They are all connected,” one House Republican warned of the trio of bills.
Members of Congress are confronting a grim reality: They are ill-equipped to rein in advanced artificial intelligence that one expert warns could “kill us all” by the end of the decade.
A viral social media post this week from ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon cautioned that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” as they race to develop superintelligent models — prompting alarm from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and new calls to action.
In conversations with Blue Light News throughout the day Wednesday, more than a dozen lawmakers and aides from both parties said they were hopeful Congress would start taking the issue seriously. By Wednesday evening, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, was pledging to “work with Congress” to implement “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.”
But many also conceded that Congress is currently sleepwalking into a crisis, far from ready to tackle the stakes of the moment in light of both philosophical differences and intractable partisan politicking.
“I think we’re finally hitting a tipping point,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who co-chairs the House AI Caucus, said in an interview. “I’m just so grateful that the whole world is finally paying attention … and now the question is, what do we do?”
Mounting worries inside the tech industry about a looming AI apocalypse are beginning to resonate with more members of Congress. Building on the panic seven weeks ago when hundreds of OpenAI-generated “agents” went rogue and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, lawmakers Wednesday called for radical action in the immediate aftermath of Coxon’s X posts late Tuesday night.
“There’s broad consensus — and in speaking with the AI companies directly, they want a regulatory framework,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a vulnerable moderate incumbent who has introduced bipartisan AI safety legislation, said Wednesday.
He called it “one of the biggest issues that Congress has to tackle over the next two years.”
It’s far from certain this desire to make progress on the issue will translate into meaningful legislative activity — and certainly not before the end of the year, with some lawmakers questioning whether their colleagues take the matter seriously or fully understand how the technology even works.
Democratic Rep. Sam Liccardo of California, who leads AI policy for the centrist New Democrat Coalition, said in an interview his team recently struggled to convince other members to attend a series of events at the Library of Congress that featured OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“There have been serious conversations among a small number of us, and we need that number to be larger. There is a percentage of my colleagues who are still trying to spell AI,” Liccardo said, adding, “we need to dramatically increase the base knowledge of Congress if we’re going to legislate meaningfully. And I know that is not going to happen overnight.”
Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), who introduced a bill this summer to create an AI “kill switch” with Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), said in an interview he thought efforts to put checks on advanced models would be a priority in the next Congress. Quicker action, he agreed, would be a heavy lift.
“The number of days that we have left between the election and the end of the year is going to be very tough to educate members and then move a meaningful bill,” he said. “The broad scope of members on both sides of the aisle are trying to get caught up.”
There’s also not yet consensus on the appropriate reaction and policy response to the threat posed by superintelligence. No committee in either chamber has considered a substantive proposal to put guardrails on AI development amid disagreements over how aggressive the federal government should be in regulating the private sector and stifling innovation.
Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who convened a markup of AI-adjacent bills in August that steered clear of addressing safety regulations, said in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” Wednesday that the new warnings were “highly concerning” and endorsed passing legislation to prevent “catastrophic risk.”
He pointed to a pending bipartisan bill from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that is expected to represent a more targeted approach than a version of the legislation that advanced out of the Commerce Committee in the previous Congress.
Klobuchar and Thune, however, have provided no timetable for when their new measure might be formally introduced. Thune’s office did not respond to a request for comment, while Klobuchar in a statement said only that she would “continue to work toward a bipartisan agreement on legislation for commonsense guardrails to address the risks posed by AI systems,” while adding, “it’s clear we need to act now and not wait.”
Across the Capitol, House Democrats made especially clear in the aftermath of Coxon’s X posts that they will seek to move quickly if they win the majority in November, with some now discussing whether to establish a select committee on AI.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries convened a Democrat-only AI commission this term to formulate policy recommendations after Speaker Mike Johnson declined to reconstitute a bipartisan AI taskforce, and co-chair Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) projected confidence Wednesday the group’s forthcoming report would pave the way for meaningful legislative action on AI safety.
Passing AI safety legislation will require buy-in from Republicans, however — and Gottheimer, asked if Congress is moving fast enough, blamed GOP leaders for lack of momentum.
“What you’re really asking me is if the Republican leadership is working fast enough on this, right? Because they’re the ones who control the agenda,” he said. “I think you’ve seen a lot of action out of members of Congress. I think our commission has been incredibly active.”
Other Democrats joined Gottheimer in blaming Republicans for slow-walking legislation.
“It only would take one phone call from the speaker to say, ‘I want five Democrats and five Republicans in a room, and I want them to emerge from that room next week with legislation that we can bring to committee and then bring to the floor,’” said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “That’s it.”
Spokespeople for Johnson and Jeffries did not return requests for comment.
Even if Democrats take back gavels after the midterms, they, too, lack a clear plan to address the growing threat of unchecked AI. Progressive leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), are advocating for a ban on superintelligence — a proposal that more moderate Democrats claim has no viable path to passage.
“Bernie Sanders,” said Gottheimer, “wants to put it in the box and throw it away, but that’s not living in reality. I think we need a reasonable, smart, commonsense approach that’s realistic but also sets up mandatory rules of the road — legislative rules of the road.”
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) brokered a bipartisan safety bill with Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) that the two lawmakers have pitched as a consensus proposal, but it has so far failed to win the support to advance.
“You cannot just put your head in the sand on AI and say, ‘I hope it works out.’ You can’t just go in and say, ‘Government’s got the solution — they’re just going to ban it all.’ That’s just not going to work,’” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a staunch conservative who is leaving Congress at the end of the year, said in an interview. “We’re going to have to be thoughtful as leaders and actually have some friggin’ leadership.”
Owen Dahlkamp, Gabby Miller, Katherine Long, Mia McCarthy and Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) plans to seek the top GOP spot on the Judiciary Committee, a spokesperson said. The announcement came soon after POLITICO reported that the current chair, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), does not intend to seek a fourth term leading Republicans on the panel. Lee, who is seeking her third term in November, is well down the committee’s seniority list but could make a case to the House GOP steering committee that she is best equipped to lead the key panel as a former state judge.
DALLAS — Rep. Jim Jordan said Wednesday he plans to end his eight-year run leading Republicans on two of the House’s most prominent committees after this Congress, raising fresh questions about what comes next for the veteran Ohio lawmaker.
Jordan, 62, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Republican midterm convention that he has no plans to seek a waiver of the GOP’s three-term limit on committee leaders to retain the top spot on the Judiciary Committee.
Nor, he said, would he seek to return to lead Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. He previously served as ranking member from 2019 to 2020, when he took the GOP reins at Judiciary, and has at least two terms of eligibility remaining there.
“No, I don’t plan to do that,” Jordan said. “There’s other people who are very interested in Oversight.”
Jordan could have requested a waiver from the House Republican Steering Committee, and several other sitting GOP chairs — including Agriculture’s G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and Armed Services’ Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) — are expected to do just that. He brushed off questions about why we would not join others in seeking to keep the coveted gavel overseeing the Justice Department, immigration law and other high-profile matters.
“I’m just not going to do it,” he said.
The decision is likely to stoke speculation about another potential leadership run for Jordan, who is seeking his 11th term this fall. He unsuccessfully sought the speakership after Kevin McCarthy’s 2023 ouster, and there has been open chatter in recent months that he is quietly setting the grounds to make another run at the top job.
After flatly denying plans to retain a committee gavel, Jordan was far less direct in addressing other questions about his future in the House.
“I’m focused on one thing, one thing only: winning,” he said. “If the left wins, where they want to take the country is very, very scary.”
Jordan, for instance, did not rule out running against Speaker Mike Johnson for the gavel if Republicans hold onto House majority this fall.
“As I said, I’m focused on winning. We got to win,” he said when asked if he could challenge Johnson, adding “that’s why I’ve been … in 15 different states, and so we just keep going to help our colleagues and candidates.”
Jordan only serves on the Judiciary and Oversight committees, and it is rare for veteran Republican members who are term-limited out of committee leadership posts to stick around as back-benchers in the House.
Jordan did not criticize his fellow chairs who are seeking waivers: “They want a waiver, that’s fine. It’s been granted in the past, and sometimes they get them, sometimes they don’t,” he said, noting it was “up to the conference and the steering committee.”
Asked if he would stay in Congress without a committee or conference leadership position, he noted he is running for reelection: “I’m going to go represent the people in the 4th District.”
Asked a final time what’s next for his decadeslong political career, Jordan chuckled and went through his plans for the day.
“I got like three more interviews,” Jordan said. “And then I’m going to go sit down in that suite, and we’ve got to have some popcorn and watch the speeches. I think that’s what’s next for me.”
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