Congress
While Trump Was Away, His Megabill Went Astray
President Donald Trump was only a few hours into a marathon flight from Abu Dhabi on Friday when he sent a crystal-clear message to Capitol Hill: Tidy up the house, kids, because dad’s coming home from his big work trip.
Or, translated into Trump-ese, “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’ … STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”
It soon became clear Air Force One couldn’t land fast enough.
While Trump spent the week hob-nobbing with crown princes, emirs and titans of industry, Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans were watching Trump’s legislative agenda run slowly aground. Less than two hours after Trump sent his message, a clutch of hard-line conservatives joined with Democrats to tank a key House Budget Committee vote on Trump’s big tax, border and defense bill.
It was the latest demonstration that while Johnson and fellow GOP leaders might be within striking distance of advancing the “big, beautiful bill,” Trump remains the essential ingredient to getting anything done on Capitol Hill.
So after a five-day, eight-time-zone hiatus, expect the closer to start closing. The coming week, no doubt, will see a flurry of holdouts shuffling back and forth from the Capitol to the White House, not to mention an angry phone call or 20.
“My assumption is Trump’s going to get involved — I don’t know what that looks like yet,” a senior GOP aide, who like others was granted anonymity to speak frankly about behind-the-scenes conversations, told me Friday afternoon.
Don’t expect the president to be happy about it. The view on Air Force One, according to a senior White House aide, was that Johnson & Co. need to step up their own game and get their membership in line. The person said in a text that the president is “always willing to make calls” but that “Republicans on Blue Light News need to figure their shit out.”
Frustrations inside the MAGA-sphere have been mounting for some time at Johnson’s seeming inability to find a path forward without leaning on Trump. It’s long been assumed that Johnson won’t have the political juice to push this legislation through on his own.
“You think the president likes being the president and the speaker’s babysitter?” as Ohio Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump aide, told NOTUS amid last month’s budget haggling.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said as much in a stern statement issued shortly after the failed budget vote, betraying little patience for the antics from the handful of hard-right holdouts: “The White House expects ALL Republicans to vote for this bill and successfully pass it through Committee in the near future.”
To be fair to Johnson, he’s dealing with a historically small House majority and a staggeringly complex piece of legislation. Just about any time he tries to assuage conservatives who are ideologically closer to the House GOP’s center of gravity, he repels moderates who gave Republicans their majority, and vice versa. Furthermore, presidents have always served as dealmakers of last resort in any tricky Hill negotiation
But there was real annoyance Friday at how this particular implosion had played out. It was long expected that ultraconservatives would flex their muscle — likely in the House Rules Committee, where they hold a key bloc of votes.
Instead, the showdown that was expected next week, with Trump back in town, played out as the president was wrapping up his Middle East tour. To many Republicans’ chagrin, Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) pressed forward with the failed vote Friday in spite of the obvious opposition, believing it would be best to put the holdouts on the record.
One senior Republican official expressed frustration that the episode not only made the conservatives look bad for blocking the bill, but also Trump and Johnson for suggesting they don’t have control over the process.
Friday’s budget-panel implosion was, in some ways, months in the making. As I wrote in January, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and fellow fiscal hawks have been on a collision course with a president who cares more about notching wins than curbing deficits. While hard-liners view the megabill as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reduce spending, Trump sees it as a vehicle to deliver on his campaign promises — including tax cuts and money for the Pentagon and immigration enforcement — ahead of a midterm cycle he’s increasingly obsessed with.
Trump should be worried that Roy & Co. are making demands that will be hard to meet and hard to walk back. Roy said Friday the bill “falls profoundly short” and “does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits.”
“I’m not going to sit here and say that everything is hunky-dory when this is the Budget Committee,” he steamed. “We are supposed to do something to actually result in a balanced budget. But we’re not.”
He’s set against centrists and even some MAGA loyalists who are extremely wary of cutting too deeply into the social safety net. Sen. Josh Hawley — not exactly a moderate squish — blasted the House bill and vowed not to support legislation that harms working-class families.
“They’re not on Medicaid because they want to be — they’re on Medicaid because they cannot afford health insurance in the private market,” Hawley told BLN this week, contradicting careful GOP messaging about how the cuts would only affect the “able-bodied” who should not be on benefit rolls.
Aside from Medicaid, GOP leaders are scrambling to deal with blue-district Republicans who are insisting on hiking the cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction, red-state members who fear their state budgets are at risk and farm-state types who want to preserve at least some Biden-era clean energy incentives.
This has mostly been Johnson’s problem to solve, and he and other GOP leaders have tried to be sensitive to not pulling Trump in too early to fix their problems. There’s an internal understanding that they need to do most of the cleanup on their own before calling dad and tattling on the naughty kids.
There’s other levers they can pull on, too. Vice President JD Vance has helped resolve some thorny Hill matters, and members of the president’s inner circle have perfected the art of dogging Republicans who stand in their way with online pressure campaigns.
Don’t be surprised in the coming days when the White House activates allies on the outside while Trump employs the inside game to move people to “yes.” Indeed, the Trump administration official whom I texted with Friday warned obstructionists they’ll pay a price.
“Voters gave them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass a good bill,” the person said. “And for those who vote against, they should know their careers are in jeopardy.”
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee said he’s not willing to “accept bad results” as a tradeoff for the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence — a direct rebuttal to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“As someone who practiced health care for 28 years, I’m never willing to accept bad results. I think we just need to do our best,” Rep. G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters Monday.
He was responding to Altman’s comments to Decoded by Blue Light News that people “should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Pressed further on whether he agreed with Altman’s premise, Thompson replied, “No, I think we have to work harder to prevent any bad things from happening.”
Altman’s comments come in the wake of increased panic over the risks of catastrophic destruction from AI, with many industry leaders and experts arguing that guardrails are needed on the technology to prevent it from spinning out of human control.
Pressure is building on Congress to regulate the rapidly-advancing technology, but lawmakers are divided over whether the AI industry needs federal regulation or if it’s capable of governing itself.
The executives of major AI labs and tech companies gathered at the White House last week to discuss solutions with President Donald Trump, who believes overregulating AI will have national security repercussions. The group ended up signing a “morally binding” AI accord that critics say won’t do enough to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Thompson noted Monday he believes that AI will bring “tremendous solutions,” specifically in regards to finding cures for health issues like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But he also said AI has to be led with “principle” — comparing it to how he addressed digital assets in a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, which he worked on as chair of the Agriculture Committee.
“The first principle is ‘do no harm.’ So we need to protect consumers, and that means, I think, building some guardrails — some guidelines — to do that,” Thompson said. He added that the second principle is to “foster innovation.”
“I think AI has a lot to do with that,” he added. “I don’t think AI works without RI: Real Intelligence.”
LE SUEUR, Minnesota — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is no “consensus” yet on advancing a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time even as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Republicans to pass it.
Thune addressed the matter in a Monday interview after Trump used his Truth Social account multiple times over the weekend to rail against the legislation, known as the Sunshine Protection Act — going so far as to post the personal cell phone number of one of its GOP opponents, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“The president feels strongly on it like he does a lot of issues,” he said. “It’s something we’re having conversations about but there’s no clear path forward or consensus on it yet.”
While Trump singled out Cotton for scrutiny, Thune made clear the opposition to the permanent daylight saving time proposal — which would lead to very late winter sunrises in some parts of the country — ran deeper than one senator.
Cotton has publicly voiced opposition to the proposal for year, citing, among other things, the fact that children in his state would be going to school in the dark for part of the year.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voiced similar objections Monday to reporters in the Capitol, saying he was mindful of “safety concerns in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus in very early hours.”
Thune, who spoke during a campaign swing in Minnesota with GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya, has himself opposed previous daylight saving bills. He said Monday that “a lot of it depends on where you are in the country” and that “your geography probably has as much to do with your position on that as anything.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has aligned himself closely with Trump, is among the lawmakers who have been pushing to get the bill through the Senate. He recently told POLITICO, “I’m going to make sure it gets passed this year.”
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Democrats have pulled back some of their ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, days after the top Senate Republican super PAC paused its future spending in the state.
WinSenate, a group affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, has removed roughly $1.1 million in North Carolina ad buys this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The group still has roughly $18.8 million in future reservations through Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing this race through to victory, and will continue to make spending decisions based on how to best build a strong Senate majority,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.
The move, combined with the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund’s decision to pause future spending, are a signal that both parties are shifting resources amid an ever-expanding Senate map. Democrats are increasingly confident in their North Carolina Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, as he continues to hold a sizable lead in public polling over Republican Michael Whatley — but some privately say states like Michigan and New Hampshire need more resources.
Meanwhile, multiple Republican groups, not just SLF, have retreated from the state in recent weeks, effectively deciding that it’s no longer worth the money to boost Whatley’s campaign.
The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action left North Carolina off its $22 million list of future spending across key Senate contests, and Old North Action removed $6.5 million in ad reservations last month.
The Cooper campaign, however, is still treating the race as competitive, pointing to North Carolina’s closely divided electorate and the fact that President Donald Trump won the state in each of the past three presidential elections.
“North Carolina is a truly 50/50 state and Democrats haven’t won a US Senate race in 18 years. We can’t take anything for granted or our eye off the ball,” said Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to the Cooper campaign. “DC is broken and we’re going to continue to run this race like we’re ten points down to ensure North Carolinians get the change they desperately need.”
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