Congress
Trump loyalists face off to lead a decimated House GOP
House Republicans are responding to the resounding rebuke of their party by launching headlong into a leadership contest where neither candidate appears willing to break with the person congressional Republicans most blame for the sweeping midterm losses: President Donald Trump.
Both Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise are known to their colleagues as close Trump allies, and neither indicated they intend to put any daylight into their relationships with the president in their initial statements declaring their intention to run for minority leader.
Jordan, the longtime conservative brawler and sitting Judiciary chair, pledged to push back on Democratic excesses including “investigating every facet of the Administration and private entities across the country.”
Scalise, the current majority leader and a fixture of GOP leadership for more than a decade, also raised the prospect of pushing back against Democratic investigations and a possible Trump impeachment while telling colleagues that the president needed a “tested negotiator working alongside him to secure administration priorities.”
Those pledges to fight Democrats on Trump’s behalf came at the same time that other members were musing both publicly and privately about the president’s rapidly waning influence — and the imperative for lawmakers to start taking steps to craft a political future without him in it.
“Let’s start being a separate branch of government,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring at the end of the year, said in a text message about the election. “We’re not an appendage of the White House.”
Few House Republicans expect Scalise or Jordan to publicly break with Trump, which would be wildly out of character for either of them. Scalise traveled with the president during the final days of the midterm campaign season, and Jordan rose from a hard-right rabble-rouser to a cable-news fixture in part by embracing Trump.
Trump, for his part, said Wednesday he’s not planning to weigh in on the upcoming GOP leadership race that erupted immediately after Speaker Mike Johnson announced he would step aside as top House Republican in the next Congress.
“We’ll stay out of it,” Trump said. “All good people. I guess right now you have two candidates, right?”
Candidates in other House GOP leadership races similarly did not mention the need for the party to chart an independent course, but most stressed party unity and prioritizing members’ nuts-and-bolts concerns.
Members, meanwhile, spent Wednesday talking privately among themselves about the historic electoral wipeout — which could see Democrats win 260 seats, more than they’ve had since the early 1990s — and Trump’s role in bringing it about.
Trump responded to the loss by arguing Republicans simply do not vote if he is not on the ballot — cold comfort for lawmakers who will never appear on a ballot with Trump again.
A House Republican, one of several granted anonymity to speak candidly about the president and the upcoming leadership race, predicted many members would start creating distance from the president “quickly” upon their return to Washington as they come to terms with a post-Trump future.
“I’ve been totally wrong on that before,” the member added. But “I just don’t see how any amount of contorting can polish up this turd.”
Another GOP lawmaker lamented that Trump had not gotten more honest feedback from fellow Republicans sooner.
“They didn’t call him out on things they didn’t like, over fear of retribution,” the member said. “And that’s a real problem.”
It’s an open question whether Jordan or Scalise would be equipped to do that. Jordan, a founder of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, pitched himself in a letter to colleagues as an expert in combating the hard-nosed investigations that Democrats are pledging to launch into Trump and other targets.
“I am battle-tested on the oversight front and I know the Democrats’ playbook,” Jordan said in a letter to colleagues. “I know what it will take to lead our Conference in the minority, to stay unified, and to coordinate and calibrate our response to the Democrats’ tactics.”
Underscoring his support on the right, Jordan won an endorsement from the leader of the hard-line Club for Growth Wednesday. David McIntosh, a former House Republican, called Jordan “principled, politically savvy, [a] prolific fundraiser, and the best communicator” for the House GOP.
Scalise, whom many members see as the more moderate option, emphasized his past fundraising and legislative efforts and focused on the battle to regain the House majority — calling it his “number one goal as Republican leader.”
A third House Republican noted Scalise has to walk a fine line between being a known quantity and part of a leadership team that stayed tied to Trump’s hip.
“If people are looking for the steady hand, again, I think he’s a guy to watch,” the member said. “But we got our asses kicked. And are they going to blame Scalise for that or the president? … Johnson already did, but does his first mate have to walk the plank, too?”
In his letter, Scalise called on House Republicans to “stand united as one team, be smart and strategic to secure conservative policy wins where we can, closely coordinate our defense against aggressive oversight and together develop a clear vision and agenda to earn back the majority in 2028.”
But as the prospect of having to turn 40 or more seats sunk in on Wednesday, Republicans took stock of whether the majority would be back in reach in two years.
A fourth GOP lawmaker said the goal of 2028 flip was not “realistic” and said Republicans were better-served to adopt a battle posture as Democrats threaten investigations and impeachments. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the likely incoming Oversight chair, told targets Tuesday night to “lawyer up.”
“Is there somebody better built for that than Jim Jordan?” the Republican said.
Sen. Ron Johnson is sending a letter Monday requesting a conference meeting to discuss the midterm results and a delay in the leadership election.
Johnson has gathered enough signatures to force the meeting under the Senate GOP’s rules and is proposing the gathering for 9 a.m. Tuesday.
“Tuesday’s result was a stunning defeat,” Johnson and his backers write in the letter to Conference Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO. “Holding leadership elections without engaging in a robust discussion and evaluation of how those running for leadership intend to lead would be political malpractice”
Republicans still expect their leadership election to be held Tuesday, where Majority Leader John Thune is so far unopposed to lead the party next year in the minority.
Sen. Chris Murphy announced Friday that he has been released from the hospital after suffering a stroke last week, but will miss “several weeks” of Senate votes while he continues to recover.
“The doctors are very encouraged by the progress I’ve made so far,” the Connecticut Democrat said in a statement. “In order to take my recovery seriously and get back to work on the quickest timeline possible, I will be spending several weeks at a rehabilitation center after being discharged from the hospital today.”
He added that he remains in touch remotely with his staff and colleagues.
Murphy, who was hospitalized last weekend, said Friday that he was “diagnosed with a small bleed in the thalamus region of my brain.” Jose Suarez, the Chief of Neurosciences Critical Care at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, said in a separate statement released by Murphy’s office that the senator “experienced a small hemorrhagic stroke.”
“He has shown tremendous progress, and at the current rate of improvement, we expect that he will make a full recovery following rehabilitation,” Suarez added.
Murphy is the latest senator to suffer a stroke in recent years. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) were both hospitalized for strokes in 2022. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), at that time a Senate candidate, also had a stroke in 2022 that he later described as near fatal.
The head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said his group will still be power brokers in a massive Democratic majority in a strategy memo previewing plans for next term.
“While some in the press have speculated that a majority of this size undermines our influence within the caucus, they have it exactly backwards,” Rep. Greg Casar of Texas said in the Friday memo obtained by Blue Light News. “Big majorities are good for getting big things done. Our goal is not to win a battle against other Democratic caucuses. It is to pass longstanding progressive priorities that bring down costs, root out corruption, and boost wages.”
The CPC will have at least 105 members next term, according to the memo. If Democrats had a narrow majority, progressives — and any other faction in the caucus — could have used their votes as leverage. Now that presumptive speaker Hakeem Jeffries will have as many 30 votes to spare, Democrats broadly are recalibrating their approach next term.
Casar laid out a “three-pronged” strategy for the CPC to “wield our power” in the three-page memo — tackling legislation, oversight and “holding Donald Trump to his word on populist economic policies.”
“Small majorities give corporate special interest groups the ability to block popular populist policies by recruiting a small number of opponents; a big majority gives us the advantage,” he said.
Casar previewed how the CPC can engage with Trump, noting that “one of the few bright spots for bipartisan lawmaking” was a housing bill that banned private equity firms from buying homes. He noted the caucus should push Trump to cap credit card interest rates, lower credit card fees for small businesses and lower prescription drug costs.
“While we oppose [Trump] strongly on the vast majority of fronts, we should send bills to his desk that would lower prices and raise paychecks. If he signs them, good. If he vetoes those bills, that will propel us to a continued Democratic majority and a trifecta where a Democratic president can sign these proposals into law,” he said.
Casar also outlined oversight targets beyond the administration, urging Democrats to specifically investigate corporations that use customer data for “surveillance pricing,” health care companies that are “taking advantage of seniors” through the Medicare Advantage program and artificial intelligence labs who are “putting jobs and lives at risk.”
“By focusing not just on the Trump administration but also on big corporations and billionaires, we will show the American people we are not just anti-Trump but also pro-worker and pro-consumer,” he said.
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