Congress

Trump stuns Senate GOP with House budget endorsement

Published

1 year ago

February 19, 2025

Republicans on Capitol Hill have long wanted President Donald Trump to weigh in on the strategic disputes that have divided the two chambers over how to pass his legislative agenda.

But this is not what GOP senators had in mind.

Trump’s public call Wednesday for the adoption of a House-drafted budget framework — and the “one big, beautiful bill” it sketches out — left Senate Republicans flat-footed and uncertain about the path forward.

“As they say, did not see that one coming,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said after emerging from a morning huddle with his fellow GOP leaders. Trump, he confirmed, gave him no heads up that his Truth Social missive backing the House was coming.

It came less than a day after Thune moved to put the Senate’s two-bill blueprint on the floor — teeing up hours of debate and a grueling succession of votes that was expected to fill the rest of the chamber’s workweek.

Now Trump’s backing of the House plan has them rethinking their next moves. After meeting with members of his leadership team and Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham on Wednesday morning, Thune said he was “planning to proceed” but added that “we are interested in and hoping to hear with more clarity where the White House is coming from.”

That clarity could come early Wednesday afternoon, when Vice President JD Vance visits the weekly Senate GOP policy lunch and is expected to relay the White House position on the budget. He is likely to face pointed questions from frustrated and blindsided senators who still favor the two-track plan and harbor doubts about whether the House can actually approve its own budget.

“President Trump needs a fallback position,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, arguing the Senate should stay the course. “I’m not sure [the House budget could] pass the House or that it could pass the Senate.”

Compounding the frustration is that Republican senators have stayed in Washington for the shortened Presidents Day week while the House, pursuant to a schedule set months ago, is in recess after GOP leaders muscled their budget plan through committee last week.

Responding to Trump’s demand for both chambers to pass the House plan, one Republican senator granted anonymity to speak candidly said, “I’d love to, but the House keeps taking weeks off instead of passing budgets.”

Under the plan Senate Republican leaders laid out Tuesday, they would adopt their budget resolution late Thursday or on Friday following a “vote-a-rama” on dozens of planned amendments. Now they find themselves in a holding pattern.

Graham, asked about what Trump’s endorsement means for his budget, told reporters: “We’re gonna hear from JD at lunch, and I’ll comment after that. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso separately said that the Senate’s budget resolution is “still on schedule” for now but acknowledged there would be more discussions through Wednesday.

It’s hardly the first time Trump has caught Senate Republicans off guard since the November election – delivering a perennial reminder that the president, at any moment, can upend the legislative agenda with no warning.

After Thune won the majority leader race last year, one of Trump’s first acts was to drop the political bombshell of announcing his intention to nominate firebrand then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to be attorney general. It was widely seen as an assertion of dominance over the GOP-controlled legislative branch.

Gaetz later withdrew his name from consideration amid widespread skepticism from Republicans, but Trump and his allies have pushed through several other controversial nominees, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump has also pressured Senate Republicans to keep the door open for recess appointments, which would let him sidestep the Senate to put some of his picks in place. The idea has sparked resistance from some GOP members.

But the question of how to enact Trump’s sweeping agenda has been among the most persistent sources of tension inside the GOP. Trump has previously expressed his preference for the House’s one-big-bill approach while also blessing the Senate’s efforts to explore a two-bill alternative.

Senate Republicans have been privately vibe-checking Trump, including at a recent dinner at Mar-a-Lago and during the Super Bowl, and they believed that they had his OK to proceed. On several occasions, publicly and privately, the president said he wanted whatever could get him results.

There has also been mixed messaging coming from within the administration: Vance, White House policy chief Stephen Miller and budget chief Russ Vought are among those who have favored the Senate’s preferred two-bill approach.

GOP senators say their plan will more quickly deliver on Trump’s key campaign plank of heightening border security, and they felt even more empowered after Vought and Trump border czar Tom Homan made the case to them for more border resources at a closed-door lunch earlier this month.

“In the near term, the president has asked for resources to secure the border. We know we have to rebuild our military, and those are priorities that are addressed in the targeted bill that we put together,” Thune said Wednesday.

Many Senate Republicans, meanwhile, continue to believe that the House will not actually be able to move forward with its budget given Speaker Mike Johnson’s tight margins and the difficult policy questions they have to resolve inside their ranks.

House Republicans are planning to bring their blueprint to the floor next week but are still trying to lock down a dozen or more holdouts — a heavy lift for Johnson given his two-vote majority.

While Trump’s Truth Social post sparked immediate celebrations by some in the House GOP, he also threw them a new curveball when he said during a Fox News interview that “Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched,” aside from efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. The House plan envisions cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid.

What is clear is that Trump appears to be ready to take a more active role in getting his agenda over the finish line than he has in the past months.

“My guess is, knowing him, he’s doing everything he can to goose both houses,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said, “because time is short.”

Meredith Lee Hill and Joe Gould contributed to this report.

Congress

Trump-backed Marty O’Donnell wins primary for battleground Nevada House seat

Published

4 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump-endorsed Marty O’Donnell won the GOP primary Tuesday to take on Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in Nevada’s battleground 3rd District.

The seat, which touches parts of Las Vegas, is one of Republicans’ targeted pickups this November since President Donald Trump carried it by less than 1 percentage point in 2024 after losing it by nearly seven points in 2020.

But O’Donnell — who also has the backing of the National Republican Congressional Committee — will face an uphill battle. He recently came under fire for hosting a neo-Nazi influencer on his podcast. Trump’s tariffs have hit the district hard, with Canadian tourism to Sin City down by 17 percent, leaving Democrats confident they can hold the seat.

O’Donnell is best known for his role as the audio composer for the “Halo” video game series. It’s his second run in the district after placing fourth in the 2024 Republican primary.

O’Donnell bested several candidates Tuesday, with businessperson Tera Anderson and former Ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter — who ran for Senate in 2024 — putting up the most significant challenges.

Congress

Sen. Lindsey Graham wins primary over ‘America First’ challenger

Published

7 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate.

Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch — who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also drew support from some of the president’s most prominent MAGA Republican critics.

But Graham won more than half the primary vote, allowing him to avoid an embarrassing two-week runoff sprint. He is expected to cruise to victory in November; a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate since 2005, when longtime Sen. Fritz Hollings chose not to seek reelection.

The four-term senator spent big in the final weeks of the campaign to make sure he won, combining with his allies to spend over $18 million in television and digital ads touting his record and endorsement from President Donald Trump. That spending proved to be decisive in staving off Lynch’s challenge from the right.

He even called in the big guns for a last minute bump, bringing in Trump, who reaffirmed his support for his occasional frenemy in a telerally on the eve of the primary election.

Graham’s success is a loss for the strict “America First” wing of the GOP that has criticized the president’s new interventionist foreign policy streak, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. They came out in support of Lynch during the final stretch of the campaign, though that was not enough to upset Graham, a fixture of Columbia and Washington politics.

Congress

20 House Republicans cross party lines to pass pro-union bill

Published

9 hours ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Twenty House Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to help pass a Democratic-led bill Tuesday aimed at making it easier for workers to form unions, widening the divide between a bloc of pro-labor Republicans and GOP leaders.

Democrats successfully used a discharge petition to sidestep Johnson and force the vote with the help of a handful of House Republicans, including Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Nick LaLota of New York.

“It’s passing,” Fitzpatrick said before the vote when asked about Johnson’s efforts to whip Republicans against the bill.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act aims to reduce the amount of time between workers voting to form a union and negotiating their first collectively bargained contract, in part by requiring the parties to more quickly enter federal mediation. It’s the latest in a series of employment bills that pro-union House Republicans have bucked their party on in recent months.

House Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) spoke out sharply against the bill on the floor Tuesday, saying it would “threaten jobs, kill growth and in some cases, shut business down entirely.” But a hefty subset of Republicans backed the bill nonetheless, joining all voting Democrats.