Congress
Scalise, committee chairs huddle with White House officials on GOP agenda
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise held a dinner Monday night with Republican committee chairs and senior White House officials to discuss the GOP legislative agenda ahead of the midterms, according to five people granted anonymity to share details of the private event.
White House deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs James Blair was in attendance at the dinner, held at a Capitol Hill restaurant, alongside the administration’s legislative affairs director James Braid and top House liaison, Jeff Freeland, according to the people.
Blair and White House officials discussed key affordability policy areas they feel are especially salient in a midterm election year, including housing. They also raised health care and economic issues — topics Trump plans to hit on in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
But notably, the people with knowledge of the meeting said the group did not discuss pursuing these priorities through another party-line budget reconciliation package.
Scalise said in an interview Tuesday afternoon he organized the dinner to coordinate with the White House and invited the chairs to share details of the legislation they plan to work on for the rest of the year.
White House officials also gave a rough overview of what to expect from Trump’s State of the Union speech, Scalise continued.
Blair and other White House representatives said the president will laud American greatness ahead of the country’s upcoming 250th birthday, according to Scalise. Trump will also talk about “the mess he inherited from Biden,” including high inflation and rampant illegal border crossings.
Trump will give examples of how he’s working with his Republican majority in Congress to fix a lot of those problems, but “also make clear that the work’s not done,” Scalise said.
He added that Trump’s speech also will preview “what we need to do in the next few months” ahead of the midterms.
This time last week, the progressive and moderate wings of the House Democratic Caucus were gearing up to battle for influence in what they thought might be a slim governing majority. After surpassing expectations to win as many as 260 seats Tuesday night, members are showing signs of detente.
The results of the blowout midterm elections mean that House Democrats’ major ideological contingents will all swell in the next Congress. The centrist New Democrat Coalition is projecting at least 140 members, with the even more moderate Blue Dog Coalition grow to more than 20. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, meanwhile, is expected to have more than 100 members, six of whom identify as democratic socialists.
The prospect of having a 30-vote-minimum margin to pass legislation means no one group will come to the table with an obvious edge that would handcuff the likely incoming speaker, Hakeem Jeffries. If Democrats’ midterm gains had not been so pronounced, members might have more easily weaponized the narrow margins for their own political gains — by withholding their support for party-line bills, for instance, or opposing key procedural votes.
“There’s been so much attention throughout the course of this campaign, because of some really tough primaries that happened very early on in the primary season, about intraparty squabbles among Democrats,” Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, who runs the centrist New Democrat Coalition’s campaign arm, told reporters Wednesday.
“But what happened last night was a political earthquake,” he continued, “where the American people demanded that checks and balances be restored to government.”
That’s not to say that Democrats won’t disagree next year. The caucus won’t unite overnight on whether to advance Medicare for All or end aid to Israel, and the party infighting over emotionally fraught issues could get ugly. Both moderate and progressive members insisted in interviews and media calls Wednesday that their proposals are best suited to satisfy voter demands to lower costs and tackle corruption.
“I’ve always said that being a progressive just means you’re the first to the best and most just idea, and then everyone else runs to catch up with you,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, adding that it will be “the CPC [that] will continue to be a leading force in driving, accomplishing these ideas across the finish line.”
“Many of the policies [democratic socialists have] been championing just won’t hunt with the average Blue Dog and the district they represent,” said moderate Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who added there are “plenty of policy areas where we can find common ground.”
Buoyed by their massive new mandate, however, Democrats were starting to talk about a deliberative, consensus-building blueprint for governing that would not involve hard-line tactics like those deployed by House Republicans over the last two years. Thanks to the GOP’s razor-thin majority, just a few members had the power to wrestle control of the floor from leadership and derail legislative business for days.
Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a member of the New Dems, said there will be a broad imperative to accommodate Democrats’ “big tent” and give some deference to the members who helped build the new House majority in swing districts.
He added, “It’s a leadership challenge for all of us to make room for those folks to find those commonalities and overlap to develop relationships.”
Jeffries was leaning into consensus proposals at a news conference Wednesday morning. When asked about advancing policies like Medicare for All, he talked about legislation that the entire party backs — reversing Republican-led Medicaid cuts and extending enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits.
“We’ll have a family conversation when we get back, and certainly in the new Congress, about what’s the best way to do that beyond what we know we need to do immediately,” Jeffries said about health care.
The House will gavel back into session next week, and sitting Democrats will gather with incoming freshmen for orientation — an early opportunity for members from disparate ideological factions to find common ground. It could help that the next two years will be more about building a platform for 2028 rather than trying to actually pass laws given the likelihood of a presidential veto.
Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois last month said she and her progressive colleagues were coming up with a list of “non-negotiables” for a House Democratic majority platform. In an interview Wednesday she said the party’s vote cushion would work to progressives’ advantage: “There’s no excuse that we can’t, in fact, pass Medicare for All because we can’t put these three frontliners on the line.”
Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, the likely incoming chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and an ally of leadership, said in an interview Tuesday night as the polls were closing that he was optimistic Democrats would “compromise among ourselves for the benefit of the American people.”
“I think that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “That’s why I think that the candidates that turned red seats into blue seats, that’s why they ran.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune spoke Wednesday with President Donald Trump after the party’s sweeping losses Tuesday, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose the private discussion.
The conversation comes amid speculation in and out of the Capitol about whether Trump would publicly stand by Thune if the GOP lost its Senate majority. But so far Trump has stayed silent on Thune while telling reporters Wednesday he would stay out of the brewing House GOP leadership race.
Thune has long said he intends to run for another term as leader, and GOP senators believe he’ll keep the job. A spokesperson reiterated Wednesday he will run for leader in Tuesday’s closed-door election.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer launched his run for the minority whip job Wednesday in a letter to fellow Republican lawmakers, telling them, “There is no sugarcoating the failure we just experienced.”
“We lost, and I take that loss personally, both as a competitor and a member of this team,” the Minnesotan wrote about Tuesday’s results, adding, “We are down, but we are not out.”
Emmer, the No. 3 GOP leader since 2022, would rise to the No. 2 position if successful. He is expected to face Rep. August Pfluger, chair of the influential Republican Policy Committee.
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