Congress

Ways and Means chair warns he ‘won’t support’ next reconciliation bill without tax provisions

Published

2 months ago

June 9, 2026

House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith says he won’t get behind the GOP’s next budget reconciliation bill if tax provisions aren’t included.

“I won’t support it unless tax is in it,” the Missouri Republican said in an interview Tuesday morning — a potential warning to GOP leaders who can’t afford defections given their razor-thin majority.

As House Republicans prepare to follow last summer’s tax and spending megabill with passage of a party-line immigration enforcement package as soon as Tuesday night, conversations have turned to what the GOP would put in a third filibuster-skirting reconciliation measure.

House GOP leaders have been meeting with different factions of their conference in recent days and weeks, from moderates to hard-line conservatives, on what they might support. There are talks about cracking down on fraud in health care and other social programs and adding some federal energy permitting provisions.

Leaders may try to revive a number of provisions that were ultimately not included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, such as one that would adjust a property’s purchase point for inflation. Smith said he has a list of priorities that he would “be happy to release” once Speaker Mike Johnson confirms that taxes will be part of the next reconciliation package.

But Smith said Johnson has not yet communicated to him whether his committee would have buy-in.

“I have not been notified whether tax is part of reconciliation yet,” Smith said. “I’d love for the speaker to say tax is going to be a part of it.”

A number of House Republicans — including those in leadership — are voicing concerns that including tax provisions would allow Democrats in the Senate to force floor votes on politically fraught health care amendments, putting vulnerable Republican senators in a difficult spot just before the midterms.

Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who will need to thread this needle on his side of the Capitol on behalf of his members, said in an interview Monday that he didn’t know what discussions were happening in the House.

He said there is “a lot of tax law that would be helpful to do” in a third reconciliation bill, and that “there are a number of reforms of the health care entitlement system — particularly the health care entitlement system — that I think would be very helpful and would not reduce health care access or reduce access to any of our safety net programs.”

Yet Crapo waved off a question about whether some looking for cost savings in Medicare could create difficult votes for senators in tough races.

“These are always battles,” he said. “I think the American people are completely ready to see us deal with waste, fraud and abuse in all government spending.”

Congress

Thune tries to fend off Trump’s war on the Senate recess

Published

2 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump is intent on forcing an August breakthrough on his No. 1 Capitol Hill priority. John Thune has the unenviable task of trying to bring him back to reality.

Fixated on the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act, Trump is ramping up pressure on the Senate majority leader and fellow GOP senators. He’s now going after one of Congress’ most sacrosanct elements of the congressional calendar — the August recess — to try to force Republicans’ hands.

But Trump’s demand to keep lawmakers in town, delivered in a Monday morning Truth Social post, immediately won a skeptical reception from Thune and other senators who argued that holding senators hostage in Washington wouldn’t actually deliver what Trump wants. Neither the elections bill nor his bid to end the 60-vote legislative filibuster to pass it can succeed, they said, despite the president’s frequent verbal sledgehammering.

“If I thought there was a path to getting a result, I’m all for it. … But I’m still, show me how this ends,” Thune told reporters Monday about Trump’s recess cancellation demand. “If we are going to be sitting here and in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger earlier this year, argued the effect could be worse than simply wasting time — that it could backfire politically with only a few months before the midterms.

“Disappointing [Trump] but also our voters 99 days before the election strikes me as a bad idea,” Cornyn said. “If you promise [voters] the sun and the moon and the aurora borealis, then you can’t accomplish it, then they’re going to be disappointed and they’re going to be more focused on us than they are Democrats.”

The issue for Trump, conservative activists and their Hill allies is that there is a quiet majority of Senate Republicans who back the SAVE America Act but also oppose eliminating the filibuster and don’t want to invite a deluge of criticism from the party base by advertising their position.

Enough Senate Republicans voted to debate the elections bill earlier this year only after leaders privately offered reassurances that it wouldn’t turn into an attempt to undo the 60-vote threshold.

Republicans are expected to discuss Trump’s push to stay in session during closed-door meetings this week, as well as his separate demand that they adopt a budget blueprint before they leave town for a $95 billion party-line spending bill that would include some election-related spending.

Party leaders are eager to get their members back home, where they can spend time on the campaign trail, where the GOP is not only facing the usual midterm headwinds for the president’s party but also muddled messaging from the White House.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a member of GOP leadership, predicted that it would be an “interesting” week.

Asked if she thought the math would change if the Senate stayed in town, Capito said, “I can’t predict that.”

But there’s no sign yet that either Trump or his closest allies on Capitol Hill are ready to accept that reality. Instead, they could force the Senate to hold a vote on whether or not to stay in session, which could give the party’s disgruntled base fresh ammunition to use against members of the party just months before Election Day.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said over the weekend he opposed leaving for the break, and a slew of conservative colleagues have since piled on.

“I stand ready to stay in Washington through the August recess — as long as it takes — to get the SAVE America Act passed,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) posted on X.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) added that “now is the time to dig in, eliminate the manufactured filibuster, and start a new Senate tradition of actually getting things done for the Constitution and the American people.”

The SAVE America fight has weighed even more directly on Thune as pressure builds on him personally.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that “patience is running out” with the Senate GOP leader. The president also urged supporters during a rally last week to call Thune directly to tell him to pass the elections bill as he revived his call to nix the filibuster.

Thune pushed back Monday, saying the Trump administration has known for months that there aren’t the votes to get rid of the 60-vote hurdle. White House officials, he said, met with about 20 GOP senators earlier this year to discuss the issue. Fifteen of the 20, he estimated, opposed moving to simple-majority passage akin to the House.

“This is not an open question,” Thune said. “It’s just a fact. And the facts don’t change. Now, if he can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are ‘nos’ into ‘yeses’ then we have a different conversation. But that’s just the reality.”

Staff for the Senate Republican Conference, which is chaired by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), circulated internal talking points to Republican offices Monday that were obtained by Blue Light News. They encouraged senators to emphasize that they would support staying into the August recess if it would change the outcome, but it won’t.

“I don’t think staying in session will make more votes appear. … And we have work to do at home to make sure that we beat the Democrats in November,” the memo reads.

Underscoring how Trump’s tiff is threatening to overshadow the GOP’s legislative agenda ahead of the recess, the guidance also encouraged Republican senators to “reject the false choice between the President and Senate leaders: express support for both.”

It also recommended GOP senators say that Trump and Thune “are united and doing an excellent job delivering safety and prosperity for Americans, despite unprecedented Democrat obstruction.”

Congress

Cornyn wants Trump IRS settlement rewritten before voting for Blanche

Published

3 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. John Cornyn said Monday he will not support Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general absent a written modification to the settlement agreement President Donald Trump entered into with his own administration.

Opposition from the Texas Republican could sink Blanche’s nomination in a highly anticipated Judiciary Committee vote scheduled for Thursday.

While Cornyn said he is in talks with Blanche and others at the Justice Department, he has not secured changes he has demanded to the settlement agreement between Trump and the IRS. Those include formally rescinding a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and restricting the scope of tax audit immunity granted to the president and his family.

Cornyn told reporters he needs the document to be signed by Blanche but did not specify whether Trump also needs to sign it.

“We’re talking about that. That hasn’t been fully resolved yet,” Cornyn said in a subsequent interview when asked if Trump needs to sign the modification as well. “We’re still talking. I mean, there’s different ways to approach it.”

Time is running out for Blanche to meet Cornyn’s demands ahead of Thursday’s committee vote, where any one Republican’s opposition could be fatal to the nomination. The senator said Blanche and the administration have been so far “reluctant” to follow through.

At his nomination hearing last week, Blanche testified that plans for the payout fund were dead and that the audit agreement was more limited than set out in the settlement. But Cornyn honed in on the text of the agreement, which states that it “may be modified only with the written agreement of the Parties.”

Blanche acknowledged during the hearing that, without a written change to the agreement, the anti-weaponization fund could still be revived.

“That’s what we’re trying to get them to agree to, which is again what his sworn testimony was,” Cornyn said. “So I don’t know why they’re so reluctant to do that.”

The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Congress

Clayton on verge of confirmation as intel chief

Published

4 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jay Clayton is on the verge of becoming President Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence — though Democrats won’t be helping him get there.

The news: The Senate on Monday voted 51-43 in a party line vote to move forward with Clayton’s nomination, teeing up a final vote as soon as Tuesday to confirm him as the next head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. No Democrats joined their GOP counterparts in support of Clayton.

Clayton, the top prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and a former SEC chair, will take over from acting spy czar Bill Pulte and join Trump’s Cabinet when he’s confirmed by the full Senate.

Why it matters: At some level, that’s a win for Democrats, who have been eager to replace Pulte, a Trump loyalist with no background in national security, since the president named him to the post last month. But after an up-and-down confirmation process for Clayton, Democrats have new reservations about the incoming intel adviser, as Monday’s vote underscored.

During his Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Clayton refused to say that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 vote, leading Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Panel to vote against his nomination. That marked a reversal from June, when Senate Democrats worked with their GOP counterparts to fast-track Clayton’s confirmation in exchange for renewing a powerful spy law. That deal fell apart after Trump intervened, alleging on social media that Democrats weren’t delivering on their end of the deal.

Open question: Though Clayton’s confirmation now looks imminent, Senate action on the spy statute that was supposed to be part of the deal — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — is not.

With the House already gone for the August recess, the Senate appears unlikely to vote on Section 702 until September.