Congress
Trump doesn’t give Congress much to do before the midterms
President Donald Trump sketched out his vision Tuesday night of Republican governance heading into the midterms. Congress is barely in the picture.
From a legislative perspective, Trump’s State of the Union address was notable for what it didn’t include. He gave Republicans a pass on trying to revive his global tariff campaign after a major Supreme Court setback. He didn’t demand another party-line domestic policy bill before November, and he even skipped a jab at one of his favorite punching bags, the Senate filibuster.
Instead, Trump used the bulk of the speech to lean into red-meat issues like illegal immigration and gender-affirming health care, while encouraging lawmakers to tackle a few relatively minor topics — many of which have already been churning behind the scenes for months.
“He wasn’t really pushing us to do anything we don’t [already] want to do,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said.
The upshot is that Trump’s prime-time address is unlikely to make more than a ripple in the congressional agenda over the coming months. It’s the reality, Republicans acknowledged Wednesday, of life in Washington right now: Despite its trifecta, the party’s legislative ambitions are being hemmed in by its barely-there majorities.
“I think we know what the agenda items are,” Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) said. “Accomplishing those is going to be hard with a small majority.”
GOP leaders on Capitol Hill are vowing to focus on pocketbook issues heading into the midterms, as they try to convince skeptical voters the party is responding to lingering economic angst.
The Senate, for example, is expected to tee up a bipartisan housing bill at the end of this week, and Majority Leader John Thune hinted Wednesday that other measures, such as an energy permitting overhaul, could be on the chamber’s to-do list for the rest of this Congress.
But Trump showed only passing concern about lawmakers’ anxieties Tuesday, sending the message that the economy was on the rebound — asserting that prices were falling just fine and that last year’s GOP megabill did quite enough to address any voter concerns.
He mentioned “affordability” only to engage in a blame game — accusing Democrats of embracing that word “knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure.”
Instead, Trump pressed lawmakers to “codify” a drug pricing plan his administration negotiated with some pharmaceutical manufacturers and rolled out a retirement savings program that largely builds on a bipartisan law signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden. He also weighed in on the housing proposal, urging members to limit home purchases by institutional investors.
Those matters have already been percolating on Capitol Hill, with internal divisions among Republicans creating major obstacles in some cases.
“On our side, obviously, they’re not unanimous,” Thune said about the housing and drug proposals. “There are a lot of these things that are not just that clear cut.”
The situation in the House is even more tenuous. While the thin GOP majority there was able to eke through a partisan elections bill Trump highlighted Tuesday, they have had a harder time building support for another bill that earned a presidential endorsement: a ban on lawmaker stock-trading.
Speaker Mike Johnson, while not ruling anything out, acknowledged his “small margin” will affect what items on Trump’s wishlist, if any, ultimately make it to the president’s desk. Republicans can currently lose just one vote on party-line matters, and one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, is facing pressure to resign amid allegations of an affair with a subordinate who died by suicide.
“I’ve got effectively a zero-vote margin at the point that we are now, so I’ve got to have near-unanimity among Republican priorities,” Johnson said. “I would like to say we could do some bipartisan things, but it’ll be up to the Democrats.”
Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.) characterized the House GOP as a “micromajority” Wednesday and questioned whether one of its members — Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who frequently breaks with Trump — even still qualified as a Republican: “I don’t know what party he belongs to, but it’s not ours.”
Trump did use his bully pulpit Tuesday to urge Senate Republicans to act on the House-passed elections bill, the SAVE America Act, that would place new restrictions on the ability to vote. That included an apparent appeal to Thune, who was in the House chamber for the speech.
But Trump didn’t push to skirt the 60-vote legislative hurdle by forcing Democrats to hold the floor in a so-called “talking filibuster” to oppose the bill — as some conservatives personally lobbied Thune on the House floor Tuesday to do, the Senate leader acknowledged.
Thune said he has tentative plans to bring the bill to the floor sometime next month, so long as the Department of Homeland Security shutdown is resolved. But the lack of a sustained presidential push to upend existing filibuster rules makes it even more likely the legislation is likely to sputter out.
Thune, who has repeatedly warned about the potential pitfalls of the talking filibuster approach, said Wednesday it was “a very real possibility” the bill could be brought up under the usual approach that would allow Democrats to quickly block it.
The reality of Congress’ legislative morass isn’t stopping some Trump allies, who are either running for reelection or for another office, from trying to use his State of the Union speech as a springboard to action.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has linked himself closely to Trump, said Wednesday that Republicans “need to legislate with the same spirit as President Trump’s speech.” And GOP Rep. Andy Biggs, who is running for governor of Arizona, touted his own legislation that he said aligns with Trump’s priorities.
“I urge House Leadership to quickly move my bills that align with his priorities,” he said in a statement. “The time to act is now.”
Some conservatives continue to urge Congress to pass another party-line policy bill under filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation rules to give the party a messaging boost before the midterms.
But others who listened to Trump’s speech Tuesday weren’t nearly so inspired. One House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly quipped, “It was certainly light on details.”
A GOP senator, also granted anonymity, summed up the congressional agenda for the foreseeable future in one word: “Slow.”
Trump administration officials have told key Hill Republicans they should expect a request for an Iran war supplemental funding package by the end of this week.
The request is expected to be about $80 billion, according to five people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
But House GOP appropriators believe the Senate will likely add additional non-military items, such as disaster relief or farm aid. House GOP leaders are worried the push for a supplemental bill will undercut their effort to pass another party-line reconciliation bill with GOP priorities and extra defense funding.
Congress has long awaited President Donald Trump’s request to cover the cost of the military campaign in the Middle East. But the measure, which would need at least some bipartisan support to pass the Senate, will face an uphill fight to become law.
Many Democrats who oppose the war are almost certain to object to funding a conflict they disagree with and regard as illegal because Trump didn’t seek congressional approval.
The roughly $80 billion price tag, though, is significantly less than the approximately $200 billion the Trump administration was reportedly weighing in recent months.
The supplemental request would likely be dedicated to replenishing stocks of missiles fired off in the early stages of the war and cover other costs of military operations in the Middle East in recent months.
The leaders of several prominent House Democratic caucuses are proposing a Supreme Court overhaul as well as the Senate filibuster in response to the justices’ decision to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act earlier this year.
Their resolution obtained by POLITICO calls for the expansion of the Supreme Court and to establish term limits and a code of ethics for justices. It also calls for the elimination of the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.
While the resolution stands virtually no chance of adoption, it is the latest indicator of how the Congressional Black Caucus and other key Democrats want to respond to the April decision that cleared the way for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts. The measure also lays down a marker for progressives — who will be emboldened next Congress after defeating several incumbents in New York City Tuesday — as they seek to influence the Democratic agenda.
“The Court’s far-right supermajority poses a serious threat to any future attempts by Congress to realize the promise of a multiracial democracy, rein in executive power, champion worker’s rights, protect voting rights, and restore and strengthen the Federal protections against racial discrimination in the Voting Rights Act,” the resolution reads.
The measure is led by Democratic Reps. Greg Casar of Texas, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus; Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, who leads the CBC, Rep. Grace Meng of New York, who leads the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia. Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair who lost his bid for renomination Tuesday to a hard-left challenger, is also a lead sponsor.
The leaders of the resolution will speak at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
House Republicans have advanced a bill that would prohibit members of Congress and their family members from trading on certain Washington-focused prediction markets.
The House Administration Committee’s GOP members on Wednesday voted along party lines in favor of the legislation, which proposes to bar lawmakers, their spouses and their dependent children from participating on prediction markets that are based on the outcome of elections or government actions.
It marks the latest in Capitol Hill’s efforts to curb the threat of insider trading on the prediction markets — a risk that has burst into the spotlight in recent months after a series of well-timed trades around the capture of then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Google’s search results and the Iran war. Earlier this year, the Senate banned its members and their staffs from trading on the prediction markets altogether, effective immediately.
And yet, the House Administration Committee vote also revealed a fracture within the House over how far to go in clamping down on lawmakers’ use of the prediction markets. Democrats opposed the bill, saying it didn’t go far enough, while Republicans supported it.
Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, who is the committee’s top Democrat, argued that the legislation is “so filled with loopholes that it looks more like a sieve than a bill.” Instead of passing such a bill, he said the House should follow the Senate’s lead and approve a new and broader resolution aimed at prediction market use among members and their staffs.
“The Senate did it in a matter of minutes — no six-month grace period, no procedurally laborious process,” Morelle said. “They just went to the floor with a two-page resolution and banned it all unanimously. We should do the same.”
House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, who introduced the bill, hit back at his Democratic counterpart’s concerns by questioning why members’ families shouldn’t be allowed to bet on sports through the prediction markets — but can through sportsbooks or casinos.
The Wisconsin Republican pointed to a hypothetical scenario where a member’s child is at college and bets on a sporting event through a prediction market platform. That situation, he said, could be covered by a broader prohibition.
Steil, rather, said his bill is aimed at addressing public policy- and election-focused markets.
“Lawmakers elect to serve the American people, not to enrich themselves by wagering on outcomes from the decisions they make,” he said. “We have a real opportunity to restore trust in Congress by taking necessary steps to eliminate even the appearance of impropriety.”
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