Congressional Republicans are mulling the sale of some public lands to help pay for a massive bill to enact President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, according to lawmakers aware of the discussions.

House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman said one concept under review would involve selling some lands around Western cities or national parks to build more housing.

“It would just be in areas where you can’t get affordable housing, like for gateway communities,” said Westerman in an interview, “so you could actually have people to work in the national parks, maybe around some big metropolitan areas in the West.”

It’s still far from guaranteed this will make it into a final package, however, with more than one GOP lawmaker saying it would be a nonstarter.

Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines has already made his objections known to leaders, said an aide in a text message: “Senator Daines has never and will never support the sale of public lands.”

Another Montana Republican, Rep. Ryan Zinke — who served as Interior secretary in Trump’s first term — said he has also told House leadership public land sales are a red line for him.

“I have made clear: There are some things I won’t do,” he said. “I will never bend on the Constitution, and I won’t bend on selling our public lands.”

Democrats are also due to create a political headache for Republicans if the GOP pursues such proposals.

“If they succeed, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will sell off your right to access the places you know and love: The place you first learned to fish or harvested your first elk,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said in a statement. “The campground your family goes to on long weekends. The trail you hike to clear your head. The site that was sacred to your ancestors and is now sacred to you.”

Republicans are talking about this idea at a time when lawmakers are scrambling to find big savings and revenue generators for the party-line bill they want to pass through reconciliation in the coming months.

Speaker Mike Johnson is digging in against allowing proxy voting for the House’s new parents, heightening a standoff with members of his own party that has frozen legislative action in the chamber.

“While I understand the pure motivations of the few Republican proxy vote advocates, I simply cannot support the change they seek,” Johnson said in a Wednesday post on X.

The speaker is in a serious bind after suffering a stunning defeat over a procedural vote Tuesday, prompting him to send the House home until next Monday. Johnson’s initial effort to block a vote on a proxy-voting measure from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) failed after eight fellow Republicans joined her and every Democrat.

Luna was on the cusp of forcing a vote on her bill under a discharge petition, which can circumvent leadership’s control of the floor.

If Johnson attempts a similar move next week, Luna and several of her GOP allies insist they will vote against any effort to reopen the floor. The speaker’s leadership circle, meanwhile, says if he doesn’t try to kill Luna’s petition, House Freedom Caucus hard-liners who oppose proxy voting will themselves defeat any attempt to get House business moving as usual.

Johnson’s circle is aware of the optics of opposing accommodations for new mothers while also upholding their pro-life values and not risking electoral blowback ahead of the midterms.

“As the father of a large family, I know firsthand the difficulty and countless sacrifices that come with balancing family life and service in Congress,” Johnson wrote Wednesday. “New mothers and all young parents face real challenges in this regard. We truly empathize with them.”

But he said he had an obligation to “defend and uphold the Constitution and the integrity of this institution, which has stood the test of time for more than two centuries.”

Another House Democrat is getting an age-driven primary challenge.

Jake Rakov, a former staffer to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), is launching a bid Wednesday to oust his one-time boss. Rakov, 37, is part of a string of Democrats waging intra-party battles against a long-time House incumbents by calling for a generational change in leadership.

Standing in front of a Los Angeles structure decimated by wildfire, Rakov used a 2.5-minute long launch video to blast Sherman, 70, as out of touch with his constituents and unwilling to mount a meaningful resistance against President Donald Trump’s “MAGA hellscape.”

“He and people like him, who have stayed on for so long, who don’t even check into the district anymore,” Rakov said in an interview with Blue Light News, “are why we have Trump twice, and why our party is so bad at fighting back against him now.”

First elected in 1996, Sherman is serving his 15th term in the House. His last truly competitive election was in 2012 when redistricting pitted him against then-Rep. Howard Berman in a race that turned so acrimonious that the two nearly came to blows during a debate. Sherman ended 2024 with $3.9 million in the bank.

Rakov served as Sherman’s deputy communications director in 2017. He is active in the LGBTQ+ community in the district and sat on the steering committee for Los Angeles’ Stonewall Democratic Club.

The district spans the western San Fernando Valley and includes Pacific Palisades, a part of Los Angeles devastated by the wildfires in January. Sherman was a regular presence at press briefings in the area as a series of major fires fueled by high winds and dry brush raced through the county. He also sparred with Trump during the president’s January visit to the disaster area, challenging the assertion that FEMA was doing a poor job.

But Rakov said Sherman’s response to the tragedy was lacking and that he did little besides “maybe tweeting out a 1-800 number.”

“If I were in office and our district had gone through what it’s gone through, I would be here every recess with my staff out at the Westside Pavilion rebuilding center,” Rakov said. “How can the federal government help? Who do you need us to talk to? He hasn’t done any of that.”

Rakov pledged to eschew corporate PAC money — he is married to Abe Rakov, who is the executive director of campaign-finance reform group End Citizens United — to serve no more than five terms in the House and to hold monthly in-person town halls, a practice he says Sherman avoids.

He said his challenge is motivated more by Sherman’s leadership style rather than ideological differences.

“We’re both progressive Democrats, and I’m sure we’ll find daylight on a few things here and there,” he said, “but I think this is much more about being a better member of Congress and actually doing what needs to be done in this moment in time.”

Sherman’s speeches on the House floor and lengthy social media videos don’t win the party new voters or “get any of our message out there,” Rakov said. Younger Democrats can better relate to Gen Z and millennial voters, he argued, and know how to reach them on new mediums.

California’s primary advances the top-two vote-getters regardless of party to a general election, so Rakov and Sherman could face off twice. Such a campaign would require significant resources. But Sherman, a senior member of the House Financial Services committee, has remained skeptical of cryptocurrencies, which he has called a “Ponzi scheme.” Pro-crypto super PACs spent heavily in the 2024 election and could see an opportunity to dethrone an opponent by spending against him.

Besides Rakov, two other younger progressives have launched prominent campaigns against older Democrats. YouTuber Kat Abughazaleh, 26, is challenging Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), and Saikat Chakrabarti, the 39-year-old former aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), is primarying Nancy Pelosi. Both described their campaigns as an attempt to usher in a new cohort.