Congress
Rule vote postponed amid tariff backlash
House leaders are postponing their latest effort to block votes on President Donald Trump’s tariffs until 8:30 p.m. amid internal GOP backlash.
House Republican leaders are attempting to use a procedural measure to block any resolutions related to Trump’s tariffs until the end of July, restarting a moratorium on such votes that expired on January 31. But they face significant internal opposition from a band of tariff-skeptical Republicans, led by Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Kevin Kiley of California.
Several Republican lawmakers have expressed discomfort with a tariff regime that polling shows is broadly unpopular, even with parts of the GOP base, as Americans continue to grapple with high costs for everyday goods.
House leaders have side-stepped the controversy since last March, when they first used a procedural measure to block efforts to force a vote on the national emergency Trump used to implement the tariffs. The move has guarded members from a controversial vote ahead of a crucial midterm election and has protected the president from clear vote of Congressional disapproval as his administration attempts to strike agreements with major trading partners.
If Republicans fail to pass the new procedural block, Democrats are aiming to force a vote on Trump’s 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods as early as Wednesday, with votes on the president’s global tariffs and tariffs on Brazil and Mexico to follow.
The Senate has already disapproved of the tariffs four times.
Democrat Aaron Ford won Nevada’s gubernatorial race, ousting Republican incumbent Joe Lombardo and becoming the first Black person elected to lead the battleground state.
Ford’s victory gives Democrats a key pickup and elevates the two-term attorney general, who made his working-class upbringing and ties to organized labor central to his campaign. He joins a growing list of Black governors-elect, following earlier victories by Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Republican Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida.
Ford, a native of Dallas, campaigned on building more affordable housing, expanding union apprenticeship programs and repealing the state’s right-to-work law, with backing from the powerful Culinary Union.
His win returns the governor’s office to Democratic control four years after Lombardo defeated Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak. Ford overcame the incumbent’s substantial financial advantage in a race that tested Democrats’ efforts to win over working-class voters.
The result is a turnaround for Democrats in a state Donald Trump carried by 3 percentage points in 2024, and it gives the party an opening to rebuild support in a major battleground state ahead of 2028.
The conservative movement to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports showed its message could resonate beyond Republican strongholds.
Voters in Arizona — a state with a Democratic governor and senators — approved a ballot initiative further restricting transgender students from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
The measure expands the state’s existing ban on trans athletes participating on women’s school sports teams, adds restrictions on locker-room use and defines a person’s sex based on their original birth certificate.
Similar measures in Colorado and Washington are leading in early results, though votes are still being counted. In Nebraska, voters also added a ban to their state constitution.
The issue has found a champion in President Donald Trump, who has pushed a suite of anti-trans federal policies since returning to the White House.
But conservatives had made little progress outside the red states that swiftly passed bans in recent years. The measures on the ballot this year marked the first time voters had the chance to weigh in on the issue. The measures’ success could fuel similar campaigns to bypass resistant legislatures in more states.
Donald Trump awakens Wednesday boxed in. Already in the pincer grip of federal courts that have slowed his agenda, he now faces a historically powerful incoming Democratic majority in Congress, eager to turn their gavels and subpoena power on their longtime tormentor.
And he’ll face them down while a new crop of Republicans seeks to eclipse him as the leader of their party.
This is how the last chapter of the Trump era in Washington begins.
For Trump, it’s an unfamiliar position. He has spent a decade seeking to project invincibility and has spent the first two years of his second term asserting unprecedented executive power with little pushback from a Republican-controlled Congress. He sought to salvage that reputation with a social media post as Republican losses piled up.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote Tuesday night.
Not exactly a salve for a party in crisis.
Democrats also face a choice: how much of their investigative muscle and political capital are they willing to spend investigating a weakened Trump. The party continues to see Trump as a useful, unifying foil. Some of their incoming members have flirted with seeking to impeach him a third time, though Democratic leaders have not committed to that course.
If there was any doubt about the House’s intent, however, Rep. Robert Garcia — expected to lead the House Oversight Committee — erased it quickly.
“LAWYER UP,” Garcia posted on X Tuesday night, just as news outlets began calling the House for Democrats. Garcia and other House allies have projected a muscular investigative agenda aimed at what they have described as Trump’s corruption and alleged self-enrichment, his abuses of executive power, his misuse of pardons for the politically and financially connected and his decision to empower ICE to lead a mass deportation campaign.
Trump has never willingly ceded the spotlight — and has never needed to. Before Tuesday, he was at his weakest point in 2021, shortly after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol and Republican leaders seemed poised to abandon him. But because he remained politically viable, those leaders quickly returned to the fold, helping engineer his return to power and beat back impeachment and a fusillade of criminal charges.
Now, though, there is no political future for Trump, who is in his final two years of elected office. And it was in that context that he signaled a rare conciliatory approach Tuesday.
“We’re going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country,” he said in an interview with Blue Light News’s Dasha Burns on Blue Light News Elections Live. “I don’t want to sit here for two years just vetoing everything.”
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