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Pritzker: ‘You come for my people, you come through me’

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Gov. JB Pritzker spoke to reporters Thursday for the first time since Donald Trump’s victory, saying he expects to work with the next administration, but he issued a warning.

“You come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker said, referring to the minority and underserved communities of Illinois who remember the “chaos, retribution and disarray radiated from the White House the last time Donald Trump occupied.”

Pritzker, who served as a surrogate to Kamala Harris’ campaign, said his administration “was not unprepared” for a Trump win.

Pritzker said his administration has worked with the Democratic-led General Assembly to take “proactive steps” to shore up abortion rights and other laws that could draw scrutiny under a Trump White House. And he said Illinois would take action if the Trump administration were to circumvent government grants that were headed to Illinois. The governor said he’s had similar conversations with fellow Democratic governors around the country.

“We have like minds about protecting certain rights and making sure that we’re going to be able to withstand four years of a Donald Trump presidency and also the areas where we might work with the administration, whatever those may be,” he said.

Pritzker’s comments weren’t as inflammatory as they were on the campaign trail, when he was known to refer to Trump as racist, homophobic and xenophobic, but they were just as pointed.

The Illinois governor who is also seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2028 said Americans should be “focused on a peaceful transition of power, even if Donald Trump didn’t afford that to his successor.”

Pritzker told reporters it was too early to offer an explanation as to why Democrats failed to win over swing-state voters, including in neighboring Wisconsin, where thousands of Illinois Democrats canvassed over the past two months on behalf of Harris’ campaign.

“I haven’t seen anybody show up with an analysis of the data. There are a lot of people with opinions, and certainly Republicans are spouting off their opinions about what Democrats have done wrong in order to lose an election,” Pritzker said. “But the reality is, it’s going to take a little while, I think, before we have real answers.”

Illinois remained a blue state after the election, but Trump even made inroads here, including in the Democratic enclave of Chicago.

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Congress

Rep. Dusty Johnson to announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday

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Rep. Dusty Johnson will announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday, according to two people granted anonymity to speak about private conversations.

Johnson has served as South Dakota’s sole House representative since 2019. He’s been a key player in major deals on Capitol Hill in recent years as the head of the Main Street Caucus of Republicans.

Johnson, long expected to mount a bid for higher office, will make the announcement in Sioux Falls.

Johnson is the eighth House Republican to announce a run for higher office in 2026. Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Byron Donalds of Florida, Randy Feenstra of Iowa, John James of Michigan and John Rose of Tennessee are also seeking governor’s offices; Reps. Andy Barr of Kentucky and Buddy Carter of Georgia have announced Senate runs.

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Senate slated to take first vote on megabill Saturday

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Senate Republicans are planning to take an initial vote at noon on Saturday to take up the megabill.

Leadership laid out the timeline during a closed-door lunch on Friday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said after the lunch. A person granted anonymity to discuss internal scheduling confirmed the noon timeline but cautioned Republicans haven’t locked in the schedule yet.

During the lunch, Speaker Mike Johnson pitched Senate Republicans on the tentative SALT deal, according to three people in the room. He said the deal was as good as Republican can get, according to the people.

Johnson noted he still has “one holdout” — an apparent reference to New York Republican Nick LaLota, who said in a brief interview Friday that if there was a deal, he was not part of it.

Leaving the meeting, Johnson was asked by reporters whether he thought Senate Republicans would accept the SALT deal. “I believe they will,” he replied. “They’re going to digest the final calculations, but I think we’re very, very close to closing that issue.”

In the meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Johnson laid out details of the fragile agreement, telling Senate Republicans the House SALT deal would be cut in half, to total roughly $192 billion. They restated it would raise the SALT cap to $40,000 for five years under the current House-negotiated SALT deal, and snap back to the current $10,000 cap after that.

In related matters, Kennedy and Hoeven also said the Senate will keep its provider tax proposal but delay its implementation, which Republicans believe will help it comply with budget rules. and Johnson also told Senate Republicans that he wants to do another reconciliation bill — which senators took to mean they would get another opportunity to secure spending cuts or provisions passed that have been squeezed out of the megabill.

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Trump says July 4 is “not the end all”

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President Donald Trump on Friday backed off the July 4 deadline he set for Congress to pass his megabill, acknowledging that the timing could slip as Republicans work through a series of political and logistical hurdles.

“It’s not the end all,” Trump said of the self-imposed Independence Day goal. “It can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time if possible.”

The remarks represented a clear softening of the White House’s position from just a day earlier, when Trump administration officials insisted that the GOP lawmakers pass the domestic policy package within a week despite a series of fresh obstacles.

Senate Republican leaders are still struggling to lock down the necessary 51 votes for the bill, amid objections from competing factions over the depth of the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.

The effort has also been hamstrung by a flurry of adverse rulings by the Senate parliamentarian that are now forcing lawmakers to rewrite significant portions of the bill.

The president indicated that he has little interest as of now in trying to directly overrule or even fire the parliamentarian — a step that some close allies in Congress had called for after she disqualified several of the bill’s provisions.

“The parliamentarian’s been a little difficult,” Trump said. “I disagree with the parliamentarian on some things, and on other ways she’s been fine.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed those issues on Thursday, saying Trump still expected Republicans to coalesce in the coming days and put the bill on his desk by July 4.

But asked directly on Friday, Trump took a more ambivalent stance.

“We have a lot of committed people and they feel strongly about a subject, subjects that you’re not even thinking about that are important to Republicans,” he said, appearing to reference the policy divisions within the Senate GOP conference.

Trump also singled out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for praise despite his resistance to the bill, complaining instead about the lack of Democratic votes.

“The problem we have is it’s a great bill, it’s a popular bill,” Trump said. “But we’ll get no Democrats.”

If all Republicans vote for the bill, it would not need Democrats’ support to pass.

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