Congress

Jodey Arrington has 2 days to save the House budget

Published

1 year ago

February 12, 2025

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.

Arrington and fellow Texas hard-liner Chip Roy have battled Jason Smith, pictured, and other senior Republicans over the fiscal parameters for the sweeping border, energy and tax bill.

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.

Congress

Chuck Edwards recommended for censure by House Ethics Committee

Published

22 minutes ago

August 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House Ethics Committee recommended Monday that lawmakers censure Rep. Chuck Edwards for engaging in “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers” — cataloguing multiple episodes of sexual harassment by the married lawmaker.

Censure is the most severe punishment the panel can recommend short of expulsion, requiring targeted members to submit to a public shaming on the floor. The bipartisan panel said it plans to bring a privileged resolution to a vote once the House returns to session later this month.

A spokesperson for Edwards, 65, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a 15-page rebuttal, lawyers for Edwards said that the Ethics Committee “failed to demonstrate that either of the two staffers expressed discomfort to Representative Edwards regarding his conduct with them.” They also rejected the need for censure, noting that it has been used “sparingly in this context and directed only at matters of severe sexual misconduct.”

The panel itself released a trove of evidence including emails, text messages and photographs showing how Edwards had insinuated himself into intimate aspects of their lives.

Edwards, the committee found, made comments on the appearance of two young female staffers in his congressional office, telling them they looked “pretty” or “breathtaking” and made a comment on one staffer’s weight. He also lavished the young women with gifts, including purses valued at more than $1,000, as well as guns, shoes, flowers and one-on-one dinners.

Text messages from one of the women showed Edwards at one point sent her more than 20 containers of ice cream because, he said, she needed “a lot of cheering up!”

Sexual harassment is prohibited by House rules and federal law, and the committee found that Edwards violated “the spirit of the House’s prohibitions on sexual harassment and unwanted advances, as well as the requirement to act in a manner that reflects credibly upon the House.”

The report found Edwards brought one of the staffers to a holiday event at the White House, gave her flowers and texted her how he was “so excited about tonight” and that he pressured her to continue the night with him after the event. Edwards told the committee he accompanied that staffer to her home in Virginia because he “felt uncomfortable dumping a young lady on the street.”

Edwards also talked to that staffer and others about going to strip clubs in Washington, the report says.

The panel concluded that Edwards did not engage in sexual activity with either of the women, nor did he explicitly proposition them or other staff members for sex. Edwards, who is facing a competitive race for reelection in his western North Carolina district, cooperated with the probe, the committee said.

In one instance, the panel found, Edwards skipped House votes one night to decorate the second staffer’s Christmas tree. He also went out drinking and gambling with her. On another occasion, he recited a poem at her going-away party in his office and cried during that incident, making his staff noticeably uncomfortable.

When the second staffer left his office, Edwards helped her move back to North Carolina and sent her a handwritten letter in which he described her as “the most amazing woman” and that she had “written a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading.”

Edwards told the committee that letter was not romantic.

“It was only to imply that we had a relationship on so many different levels — on a congressional level, on a professional level, on a friendship level, on a helping-one-another-out-with-our-chores-and-responsibility level,” he said.

Congress

Cornyn, Tillis confirm they will vote for Blanche

Published

5 hours ago

August 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has a clear path to the Senate Judiciary Committee advancing his nomination to the permanent job after two GOP holdouts confirmed Monday they would vote for him.

The statement from Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) comes after the late-night announcement Sunday of a Justice Department agreement to clarify a controversial May settlement agreement between President Donald Trump and the IRS.

A successful Judiciary vote Tuesday would set Blanche up for confirmation on the Senate floor later this week, before the chamber breaks for August recess.

“We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this, and we look forward to voting to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee soon,” Cornyn and Tillis said in a joint statement.

The senators suggested their agreement with Blanche also satisfies the concerns of several other Republican senators off the Judiciary Committee who have raised concerns about the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” created in the original settlement, as well as provisions immunizing Trump and his family from some tax audits.

“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund. Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share,” Cornyn and Tillis said.

Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, John Curtis of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are among the other Republicans who have expressed concerns about the payout fund. Blanche recently visited Alaska and announced a flurry of settlements benefiting Alaska as he courts Murkowski’s vote.

Congress

Maryland Dems kick off latest redistricting effort after a year of infighting

Published

5 hours ago

August 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Maryland Democrats kicked off a special session on redistricting Monday, with the battle to redraw House districts around the country showing no signs of stopping at the November midterm elections.

Democrats are gearing up for a process to ultimately draw out the state’s only Republican member of Congress, Rep. Andy Harris. But any new map wouldn’t kick in until 2028.

Instead, the state Legislature is in town this week to vote on a constitutional amendment that some party leaders believe would insulate future redistricting efforts from legal scrutiny. This, after a Maryland state court blocked a proposed 8-0 Democratic district map in 2022, charging that it ran afoul of the state Constitution.

While Democrats around the state, including Gov. Wes Moore, had called for the Legislature to enact redistricting in time for this year’s midterms, Senate President Bill Ferguson — also a Democrat — has long argued that any map redraw coming before an amendment wouldn’t pass legal muster, and that the downside risks were “catastrophic.”

“We’ve known from the beginning what is at stake, and most importantly, we have known that in this moment of American history, it is insufficient to act with haste when the consequences of missteps are so impactful,” Ferguson said at a Monday press conference. “What those consequences could have looked like: a map rejected by Maryland’s Supreme Court. A map drawn by the court that sends us backwards when we could least afford it.”

The new language aims to make clear that certain requirements around compactness and respecting natural and political boundaries apply only to legislative districts and not congressional ones, which could clear a path for the state to gerrymander.

Should lawmakers pass it, Maryland voters would still need to approve the proposed amendment in November.

Republicans have taken a major lead in the interparty redistricting war for this year’s election, particularly after redrawing maps in a handful of Southern states after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in April.

“A legal earthquake changed the landscape this spring,” Ferguson said. “Even worse, we saw states like Tennessee, Louisiana, and South Carolina act with haste to attempt to eliminate majority-minority congressional districts. These acts changed the calculus, and that’s why we’re here.”

(Tennessee and Louisiana changed their lines for 2026, but South Carolina ultimately did not.)

The amendment, Ferguson said, “ensures that Maryland has the ability to respond if the Trump administration or any future federal administration seeks to further erode the basic standards of democracy.”