Congress
Jodey Arrington has 2 days to save the House budget
This is the moment Jodey Arrington has been waiting for: The Texas Republican and longtime fiscal hawk has a GOP trifecta, the House Budget Committee gavel and an opportunity to make the enormous cuts to federal spending he’s always wanted.
But Arrington’s now at risk of being outmaneuvered by fellow chairs, senior leaders and the Senate as frustration gives way to full-blown anger among House Republicans over how he has struggled to advance President Donald Trump’s vast policy agenda.
A plan blessed by Arrington’s close personal friend, Speaker Mike Johnson, has stalled for weeks in the Budget Committee. Arrington and fellow Texas hard-liner Chip Roy have battled Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and other senior Republicans over the fiscal parameters for the sweeping border, energy and tax bill.
Arrington on Tuesday called a Thursday meeting of his committee to settle those vast differences and advance a budget blueprint, and he now has less than 48 hours to figure out how to make it all work.
“We’ll soon find out if Jodey is in over his head,” one GOP lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, texted shortly after Arrington announced the Thursday markup.
It is, to be sure, a staggeringly difficult task to bridge the deficit-minded politics of the hard right with the more pragmatic concerns of swing-district Republicans who are wary of political blowback, and top House leaders are ratcheting up the pressure as they try to swiftly deliver Trump’s legislative agenda. His own struggles reflect just how difficult it will be for Republicans to deliver on Trump’s promises with their narrow majorities in both chambers.
Still, Arrington has struggled to get even the 20 other Republicans on his committee on the same page. He has made clear that his heart lies with the panel’s most conservative members, who see the present moment as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the nation’s fiscal trajectory on track. He’s long agitated for Republicans to get control of skyrocketing spending on the mandatory programs — including Medicare and Medicaid — that largely drive federal budget deficits.
But as a committee chair, Arrington is a de facto member of GOP leadership who is expected to fall in line behind more senior Republicans who have to balance ideology and agenda with protecting their majority — and protecting the jurisdiction of other chairs with different priorities.
Budget hawk
Arrington has allies and defenders among the small cadre of Capitol Hill budget hawks who have frequently battled Republican leaders as they push for deeper cuts than many in the GOP find politically palatable.
“I appreciate what Jodey’s trying to do over there. You know, he’s serious about bringing us back to some pre-pandemic level spending,” said Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a member of the Senate Budget Committee and a longtime advocate for spending austerity. “Unfortunately, others in his conference aren’t.”
“He’s listened,” added Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of both the Budget Committee and the hard-right Freedom Caucus. “He is doing a good job.”
But Arrington has openly warred at times with fellow chairs and other senior Republicans who believe he isn’t a reliable team player. For instance, in a private meeting Tuesday, he rebuffed Smith’s efforts to expand the scale of the tax cuts that could be embedded in the package.
Smith afterward took a public shot at him, telling reporters that the figures Arrington put forward could not accommodate both a permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts plus other campaign priorities the president ran on last year.
“Anything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy,” Smith said.
A senior Republican aide made a similar point, saying Arrington’s priorities do not necessarily align with those of the country’s most powerful Republican: “Everyone wants to cut spending. The problem is President Trump didn’t run on cutting spending. … Jodey just isn’t playing ball.”
The irony is that Arrington hardly cuts the profile of a hardcore conservative ideologue. Rather than emerge from the tea party politics of the late 2000s like many House members on the hard right, he’s a veteran of the Texas GOP establishment — an alumnus of George W. Bush’s gubernatorial administration and White House who later served as an executive for his alma mater Texas Tech.
His brand of fiscal conservatism has soft edges, much like Arrington himself — a dimpled, eager and jovial politician who has sought to rally fellow Republicans behind his “Reverse the Curse” fiscal plan.
That has been a struggle at times — one that has prompted some unusually personal clashes with fellow Republican leaders.
In early 2023, after he first assumed the gavel, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy blocked Arrington from releasing a budget that included spending cuts so drastic that some centrists worried it would hurt them politically. With Democrats in control of the Senate and White House and no chance of any budget getting adopted, McCarthy saw no point in exposing his vulnerable members to blowback over the document.
“These budget resolutions are not easy,” Arrington said in an interview that year, not long after The New York Times reported that McCarthy considered Arrington “incompetent.” (Notably, Arrington was and remains close to Majority Leader Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s chief internal rival.)
Opportunity of a lifetime
Now Arrington’s job has suddenly gone from nuisance to necessary for House Republicans. The GOP wants to use budget reconciliation procedures to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and that requires both chambers first adopting a budget resolution — a fiscal outline for the legislation to follow.
It’s Arrington who is supposed to play the leading role in drafting that outline, and people close with him say he’s reluctant to pass up the opportunity to institute serious spending reductions while also keeping tax cuts in check to finally wrangle out-of-control deficits.
But as the plan has taken shape in recent months, senior Republicans have privately complained that Arrington has dragged his feet on making difficult decisions and have questioned whether he is more loyal to the conference’s elected leadership or the Freedom Caucus hard-liners they’re trying to corral.
The tensions have been inflamed by Arrington’s internal campaign to get fellow committee chairs to cough up increasing levels of spending cuts — or, in Smith’s case, curbing his tax-cut plans — in order to keep the overall package’s deficit impact in line.
Things came to a head Monday night on the House floor, where Arrington held a tense conversation with Johnson and several other senior Republicans. The upshot was that Johnson would be shopping around a budget plan of his own — one that guarantees more modest spending cuts than what Arrington and the hard-liners have been pushing for while also reining in potential tax cuts.
After a POLITICO story Monday described it as Johnson “snatching the pen” from the Budget chair, Arrington rose inside a closed-door GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning to deny any such thing. And then, after weeks of waiting, he announced to his colleagues that his panel would finally schedule a markup later in the coming days.
Senior Republicans are still concerned that a deal won’t come together in time for the Thursday meeting, especially with the Senate Budget Committee set to move Wednesday on its own competing blueprint — one that some House hard-liners continue to prefer.
“I like Jodey quite a bit, personally — I don’t envy the position he’s in,” observed Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Budget Committee Democrat. “It’s very interesting to me that there’s suddenly a markup on Thursday, because I did not realize that somehow, suddenly there is agreement on the House Republican side.”
Mia McCarthy and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
SYRACUSE, New York — President Donald Trump came to New York on Friday to help a Republican win an uphill race for governor. But his visit was also a reminder of the complicated role he plays in his party’s fight to keep control of Congress.
Trump rallied alongside GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman, calling on New Yorkers to fire Gov. Kathy Hochul and, referring to the state attorney general, “her totally corrupt sidekick, Letitia ‘Peekaboo’ James.”
“Your city and state are dirty, filthy places, and everybody wants to leave,” he told some 5,000 attendees at a convention center in downtown Syracuse — which, he noted, was “a short distance from the beautiful shores of Lake America.”
“You gotta get your act together, and I tell you what, Bruce Blakeman will get your act together,” Trump said.
For Republicans, the president’s appearance underscored a political dilemma that extends beyond New York: Even as Trump increasingly appears to be a drag on their ticket, they need his loyal supporters to energize their base. While voters have soured on the president’s handling of the economy and costs, he remains a potent force in turning out MAGA voters — even in an otherwise Democratic-dominated state.
“The targeting of where the president goes is not a random exercise,” Marist University pollster Lee Miringoff said. “They’re looking to stir the base without stirring the opposition. They’re picking and choosing, that’s not uncommon. For him to come to New York to help the turnout upstate is a positive for the Republicans and his base.”
Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, hasn’t distanced himself from the president — nor have most of the top officials in New York’s GOP. Nearly every Republican running a competitive congressional race in this half of the state came to Friday’s rally, eager to make their presence known.
“I’m always happy to be with the president,” said Anthony Constantino, who’s running in a nearby red district that’s inched into toss-up territory. “He’s the leader of the free world, and I’m excited to have a great relation with him.”
Some GOP operatives, however, have quietly grumbled that their candidates need to start creating some distance from the president. Republicans from other parts of the state like Rep. Mike Lawler decided that campaigning in their districts was more valuable than trekking to be seen with Trump — as did several down-ballot candidates in Central New York. Democrats, notably, have been just as eager to highlight the visit.
“This is supposed to be a swing district. And the feedback I get is that the president is very unpopular,” said Democratic Rep. John Mannion, who represents Syracuse and the surrounding Central New York area. “He still certainly will have his core base of supporters, but I do think he’s lost support here compared to what he had around the 2024 election.”
Blakeman, for his part, isn’t worried about Trump’s drop in popularity.
“Kathy Hochul should be worried about her drop in popularity,” he said before taking the stage in Syracuse. “She’s the most unpopular governor in the history of the state of New York.”
Trump’s visit came against the backdrop of a darkening political environment for New York Republicans.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot a man in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, stirring fresh condemnation of Trump’s aggressive deportation policies. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has a surprisingly warm relationship with the president, called on him to cease all ICE activity in the five boroughs. Hochul stressed that the shooting took place with a five-year-old child present and demanded that federal authorities “provide answers.”
Immigration is one of several areas where Blakeman has hewed close to the Trump wing of the party throughout his campaign.
“I’m outraged with Kathy Hochul for taking sides with somebody who was a convicted felon, someone who was an alleged drug dealer, a gang member,” he said Friday about the shooting in Manhattan.
While Trump’s speech repeatedly careened back to the rhetoric one could expect from any of his rallies — boasts about the stock market, complaints about ‘Dumocrats’ — he did manage to seamlessly blend almost all of Blakeman’s oft-used talking points into his stump speech.
“Since Hochul took office, she’s raised your utility rates 48 times, and energy prices in New York have skyrocketed 100 percent,” Trump said. “If Bruce Blakeman gets in, he will cut your electric bills by 70, 80, 90 percent.”
The climate outside of deep blue New York City is also turning increasingly hostile to the GOP. Constantino, who’s running to succeed Rep. Elise Stefanik in upstate New York, trails his Democratic foe Blake Gendebien by 4 points, a Siena Research Institute survey released Friday morning found. A Blue Light News poll showed that nationally one in four Trump voters believe Republican candidates should break from the president in order to win in November.
The wisdom of appearing with Trump has been debated by Republicans throughout the country at a time when gas prices are high and a foreign war drags on. And New York Democrats aren’t viewing the presidential visit as a concern.
Much of Hochul’s messaging this year has focused on making sure New Yorkers know Blakeman and Trump are friends. Her most-aired TV commercial features a puppeteer saying one Republican would do the other’s bidding.
“Puppets are my life. You tell them what to say, they say it,” the narrator says. “But that’s not what you want in a governor.”
Earlier in the day during an MSNOW interview, Hochul dismissed the rally.
“It’s obviously a very political event,” she said. “It seems like a last-ditch effort to breathe some life into a campaign that’s on life support.”
Despite his low approval ratings with voters, Trump’s visit stands to light up a Republican base that Blakeman will need to turn out next month to help him defeat Hochul.
Polling has shown the governor leading the GOP nominee by as much as 18 points in this deep blue state. Yet some Trump supporters maintain the president can help generate much-needed enthusiasm for Blakeman, especially in areas of upstate New York where the Long Island native is not well known.
“We actually have the ability to win these elections, but I just don’t see the enthusiasm out there,” Conservative Party Chair Gerard Kassar said. “Hochul has won the day as far as being a terrible governor, but now we’ve got to get our people out to vote.”
Winning is still a tall order for Blakeman — especially in a tough national political environment where polls show GOP candidates in red states like Texas, Ohio and Kansas struggling against Democratic challengers.
Republicans have not won statewide in New York since George Pataki secured a third term in 2002. Since then, the GOP has lost all levers of statewide power, and Trump’s tariffs as well as his decision to launch a war in Iran have not helped him fulfill his campaign pledge of addressing voters’ cost concerns.
The president’s political woes aren’t going unnoticed.
Privately, Republican operatives grumbled that the president’s visit put swing seat candidates in an uncomfortable spot.
“There’s a lot of commiserating between folks within the party structure — why is this happening? Why is he doing this?” said one Republican operative who was granted anonymity to freely discuss the dynamic. “Then you’ve got the blind loyalists who say, ‘Yay Trump’s coming’ — people who are too politically dumb to understand the ramifications of it.”
Yet the head of the Republican party kept his message very much in line with Hochul’s.
“Please pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump told Central New Yorkers.
Sen. Chris Murphy wants Democrats to go big for Angie Nixon in Florida’s Senate race — and he’s pushing to raise some “serious money” to help.
“I do believe that we’d make a big mistake if we slept on Florida,” the Connecticut Democrat told Blue Light News on Friday. “I know it feels like a longer shot, but I just think this year is looking exceptional.”
Murphy plans to hit the trail with Nixon as part of a campaign swing for Senate candidates over the next three weeks that will take him through North Carolina and Florida, as well as events with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Chris Pappas in New Hampshire. Murphy will serve as a surrogate for El-Sayed in the spin room at his next debate, and said he’s “just a big believer” in the Michigan Senate nominee.
Murphy’s bullishness about a blue wave comes as Senate Democrats are pushing the boundaries of a midterm battle map that is shifting further into red territory. The Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC has dropped roughly $5 million apiece into Texas and Kansas over recent days, and the minority leader has included Kansas and Mississippi in his pitches to donors.
“If I were in charge, I would definitely put some resources in Florida,” Murphy said. “When you have an exciting candidate like this, it’s a good long-term investment” in growing Democrats’ activist base.
Still, Murphy stressed he’s “not making any formal recommendations” on where Schumer or top Democratic campaign groups should move their money.
“They’ve got so many mouths to feed,” Murphy said. “That’s why I’m going to try to step up and do some work on my own.”
Murphy, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential contender, has spread roughly $2.5 million across candidates, campaign arms and other organizations this cycle. That includes transferring more than $500,000 to Democrats’ three top campaign arms and 25 state parties.
Prominent Democrats have been ramping up their attention on Florida. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has funneled $250,000 toward Nixon’s campaign, along with other resources. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) also told Blue Light News he hopes to campaign with Nixon.
But Democrats across suddenly competitive red states are clamoring for more cash and Florida is an expensive state, complicating the chances of a significant investment from national groups.
Nixon also faces an uphill battle against GOP Sen. Ashley Moody in the Sunshine State. A progressive state lawmaker, Nixon aligned herself with the Democratic Socialists of America over the summer in a state where many voters, especially those with ties to Cuba, reject such an ideology. Also, Republicans in Florida have a 1.5 million voter registration advantage over Democrats.
Senate Democrats’ top super PAC is pushing into Kansas.
The Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC is launching a $5 million statewide television ad blitz starting Saturday through Election Day — the latest sign that Democrats believe the Senate map is shifting onto red turf.
SMP had signaled in recent days it could get involved in the race, telling Blue Light News late last month it was “actively thinking” about whether to wade into the state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in nearly a century but where Adam Hamilton narrowly leads GOP Sen. Roger Marshall in recent polls. Internal SMP polling that found an increasingly competitive race factored into the group’s decision to spend. It will also run digital ads.
“The gap is closing in Kansas,” SMP spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement. “We are committed to ensuring families understand Marshall’s real record of making health care and basic goods more expensive for working Kansans.”
Republicans are scrambling to shore up Marshall. Senate Leadership Fund, a top GOP super PAC aligned with Republican leadership, has booked over $10 million in ads through Election Day in the state, per ad tracking firm AdImpact.
SMP’s first ad attacks Marshall for joining Senate Republicans in voting to table a Democratic-led amendment last year to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. The Senate later approved legislation to release the files by unanimous consent. It’s the latest in a slate of ads from Democrats hitting their Republican rivals over the late, disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Marshall’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Senate Democrats’ plunge into the state comes as the midterm battle map is undergoing a major realignment. Georgia and North Carolina — primed to be two of the cycle’s premiere battlegrounds — are tilting left to the point where national Republicans are retracting spending in both states and Democrats are starting to follow suit, freeing funds on both sides to shift elsewhere.
Republicans are racing to reinforce incumbents across what was once safer red turf. SLF has also pledged $5 million to bolster Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina.
Democrats, meanwhile, are starting to spend more in red states. SMP has dropped over $2 million on digital ads in Texas. Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has included Kansas and Mississippi in his pitches to donors.
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