Congress

With push from Trump, Republicans finally unite on spending

Published

2 years ago

March 11, 2025

One principle has long underpinned funding negotiations on Capitol Hill: House Republicans can’t pass a spending bill without Democratic votes. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson finally quashed that assumption.

It took an all-out lobbying blitz that involved promises of future spending cuts, a scattering of presidential threats and 11th-hour policy concessions involving tariffs and visas for Afghan refugees. But in a 217-213 vote, the House passed a seven-month funding patch without needing a single Democrat. Republicans planned to immediately leave Washington and hand Senate Democrats a stark dilemma with the threat of a government shutdown looming early Saturday morning.

Besides jamming the Senate with a bill that cuts non-defense funding by about $13 billion and gives Trump more leeway to shift cash, the vote erodes Democrats’ leverage in spending negotiations for at least the remainder of the 119th Congress.

“The Democrats always got a pound of flesh,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a House Freedom Caucus member, said in an interview. “It’s just a new day.”

In their most impressive political feat, GOP leaders got the backing of the Freedom Caucus — a group of hard-liners that rose to prominence by bucking Republican leaders in spending battles. Every lawmaker in the 31-member club of fiscal conservatives voted in favor of the funding bill, marking the first time many of them have ever supported a measure to keep federal cash flowing.

“I’m as stunned as anybody else,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a longtime, die-hard opponent of continuing resolutions, said about voting for the bill this time.

To hear them tell it, the Freedom Caucus members supported the bill because it cuts spending and because GOP leaders gave them a seat at the negotiating table.

“It’s much easier to be flexible within the parameters of our own core principles when we’ve been deeply involved in crafting the legislation,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), another Freedom Caucus member, said in an interview.

But it was impossible to discount Trump’s intense pressure campaign, which unfolded both privately and publicly.

Trump and White House officials made the strategic decision to get head rebel Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and other perennial leadership critics on board with the plan early. It happened shortly after a White House meeting last month where Trump personally signed off on Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s plan to abandon bipartisan funding talks and pursue a seven-month stopgap.

The effort came down to the wire — with several Republicans holding out until the very last moment. But after dozens of meetings with hard-liners and Trump’s strongest personal Hill whip effort yet, including a bevy of calls to holdouts in the final hours, every Republican but one fell in line.

As for the lone GOP no vote, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, Trump made a public example of what happens to lawmakers who dare to cross him, calling for him to face a primary challenger. Massie was unchastened afterward: “You’re going to find out what a stinker it is when you get 10 or 15 Democrats to vote for it” in the Senate, he told reporters.

Walking to the House floor for the vote, Johnson described the president as having been “very engaged, very helpful” on getting the fractious conference behind the plan. Among those Trump called Tuesday was Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). Trump provided Burchett with assurances about deep spending cuts coming across the federal government, including, possibly, at the Pentagon.

The sudden embrace by Johnson’s right flank of a continuing resolution to fund the government represents a major paradigm shift on Capitol Hill — and reflects a serious moment of reckoning for Republicans who are both accustomed to demanding conservative purity and wary of crossing the president. It comes as the House GOP has virtually no margin to spare, given their tight majority and multiple vacancies.

“I just feel like there’s really no option here,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), another Freedom Caucus member who generally opposes continuing resolutions. “What do you do when you have no majority?”

Few Republicans are under any illusion that the party unity on spending is permanent. If the Senate passes the bill this week, it sets up more rounds of wrangling later this year — when fiscal hawks want to write serious cuts into law.

The Freedom Caucus, for instance, wants to force trillions of dollars in spending cuts to safety-net programs in the party-line package of Trump policy priorities Republicans hope to enact this year, while also codifying the elimination of jobs and programs undertaken by the president’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative in spending bills for the fiscal year that starts in October.

“I see this as getting a first down,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), formerly chair of the Freedom Caucus, said in a brief interview. “The touchdown is yet to be gotten.”

Still, the turnabout has been dramatic. Just 18 months ago, a major portion of the Freedom Caucus voted to reject a funding patch put up by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy that included Republican border security policies and an almost 30 percent cut to non-defense spending — far more than the current stopgap. McCarthy was ejected from his leadership post by hard-line conservatives four days later.

In a theatrical reminder of the irony, McCarthy visited his former House colleagues Monday and was asked how it felt to see fiscal conservatives falling in behind a temporary funding patch.

“Mine had more cuts, so,” McCarthy said, trailing off, in a brief interview as he left the Capitol on Monday night.

Many Republicans argued that this stopgap is different from others that have failed on the House floor in recent years, driving Republican leaders to negotiate bipartisan alternatives with Democrats.

“This is not your grandfather’s continuing resolution,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Tuesday, standing beside Johnson at a news conference.

Other holdouts dragged out the suspense until the very end.

Despite a stark warning from Vice President JD Vance that Republicans would bear the blame of a shutdown, a host of House GOP lawmakers left a closed-door member meeting Tuesday morning claiming they were still undecided on the funding bill. Inside the meeting, Vance issued a stern directive: “We already lost one vote, we can’t lose another.”

Jockeying for phone calls with Trump and more meetings, some holdouts persisted.

But the speaker said in a brief interview leaving the meeting that he thought there were only “one or two” actual holdouts left ahead of the vote. By the time he headed to the floor for the final vote Tuesday, he said he didn’t think any further calls were needed.

Several GOP fiscal hawks said that they were planning to vote for the funding bill only because Trump pressed them to do so.

It wasn’t due to any allegiance to Johnson or whipping effort by his team, said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), a Freedom Caucus member. Rather, he said, his vote was based on the president’s assurances alone.

“It’s his word,” Burlison said.

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.

Congress

Democrats drop $5M into Kansas Senate race

Published

12 minutes ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Democrats’ top super PAC is pushing into Kansas.

The Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC is launching a $5 million statewide television ad blitz starting Saturday through Election Day — the latest sign that Democrats believe the Senate map is shifting onto red turf.

SMP had signaled in recent days it could get involved in the race, telling Blue Light News late last month it was “actively thinking” about whether to wade into the state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in nearly a century but where Adam Hamilton narrowly leads GOP Sen. Roger Marshall in recent polls. Internal SMP polling that found an increasingly competitive race factored into the group’s decision to spend. It will also run digital ads.

“The gap is closing in Kansas,” SMP spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement. “We are committed to ensuring families understand Marshall’s real record of making health care and basic goods more expensive for working Kansans.”

Republicans are scrambling to shore up Marshall. Senate Leadership Fund, a top GOP super PAC aligned with Republican leadership, has booked over $10 million in ads through Election Day in the state, per ad tracking firm AdImpact.

SMP’s first ad attacks Marshall for joining Senate Republicans in voting to table a Democratic-led amendment last year to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. The Senate later approved legislation to release the files by unanimous consent. It’s the latest in a slate of ads from Democrats hitting their Republican rivals over the late, disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Marshall’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Senate Democrats’ plunge into the state comes as the midterm battle map is undergoing a major realignment. Georgia and North Carolina — primed to be two of the cycle’s premiere battlegrounds — are tilting left to the point where national Republicans are retracting spending in both states and Democrats are starting to follow suit, freeing funds on both sides to shift elsewhere.

Republicans are racing to reinforce incumbents across what was once safer red turf. SLF has also pledged $5 million to bolster Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina.

Democrats, meanwhile, are starting to spend more in red states. SMP has dropped over $2 million on digital ads in Texas. Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has included Kansas and Mississippi in his pitches to donors.

Congress

House Democratic campaign arm says it needs $17 million, and fast

Published

42 minutes ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is begging for resources, and setting a hard deadline for donors to give $17 million in order to compete in a handful of districts that Republicans carried easily in 2024.

DCCC Executive Director Julie Merz said the committee needs the cash influx by Oct. 22 in order to “to take advantage of the opportunities we have” outside of the core battlefield, according to a memo shared with donors on Friday and obtained by POLITICO.

If they don’t pony up, Merz warns, the party “could be leaving winnable races on the table.”

Democrats have been clear that they have a fundraising disadvantage this cycle, but they have so far been reluctant to place a specific dollar amount on their needs, making the DCCC’s memo Friday a particularly surprising outlier.

“Here’s the tough reality though: the Republican ecosystem has amassed a massive war chest that is significantly greater than ours and is spending it,” Merz says in the memo after arguing that the members of the committee “remain confident that we will win back the majority in 25 days.”

Specifically, Merz dedicates significant portions of the memo to four districts where the committee is desperate for more money in order to compete — all of which President Donald Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024:

— Florida’s 27th District (Trump +14.6)

— Nevada’s 2nd District (Trump +13.9)

— South Carolina’s 1st District (Trump +13)

— New York’s 21st District (Trump +20.7)

The fundraising disadvantage has created headaches for both House and Senate Democrats over where, exactly, to deploy the resources they do have.

The committee tells donors that their internal polling shows all of those races within reach, but that Republicans’ big cash advantages — especially in the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. — will make it harder to win those and other reach seats.

Merz also name drops a handful of other deep-red districts that are “worthy of additional investment in this environment,” including seats held by GOP Reps. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), the chair of the Republican National Congressional Committee.

The NRCC was quick to mock the DCCC’s memo.

“No amount of money fixes candidates voters don’t want. These seats are staying red, and Republicans are on offense across the map,” NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement.

Congress

Capitol agenda: How Warren could link arms with Trump’s GOP

Published

7 hours ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Elizabeth Warren may get her clearest shot yet to take on corporate America next year — thanks to the once unthinkable help of Republicans.

The Massachusetts Democrat is poised to chair Senate Banking if the party takes back the chamber. And while the progressive has long been a boogeyman to corporate America, lobbyists worry she’ll have powerful backup thanks to the surge of populist Republicans eager to take big swings at Wall Street and Big Tech.

One longtime financial industry lobbyist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Warren “has a streak that is not just wanting to be a progressive gadfly, but to actually reach across the aisle to push for policy ideas.” There is “absolutely” reason for concern, the person said.

Atop the panel, Warren would also have a strong position to shape the 2028 presidential debates on both sides.

“There’s very little doubt that the agenda of the Senate Banking Committee is going to overlap substantially with the core issues that the candidates in the 2028 election cycle are going to be grappling with,” said Dennis Kelleher, the outgoing leader of the progressive group Better Markets.

As Banking chair, Warren is expected to try to recruit Republicans in a crackdown on artificial intelligence — specifically restrictions on chip giant Nvidia’s exports to China, which already has some GOP support — and a follow-up of this year’s bipartisan housing law that sought to rein in private equity’s role in the market, according to people close to the senator.

Some of President Donald Trump’s own populist ideas, like credit card interest rate caps and limits on stock buybacks for defense contractors, would provide fertile ground for Warren.

But Trump would also likely be Warren’s biggest obstacle, as he’s been resistant to embrace policy overlaps with her. He’s also been resistant to any AI restrictions.

Warren’s approach also threatens to expose rifts between GOP populists who have been ascendent under Trump and more mainstream conservatives.

Asked about the possibility of a Chair Warren, Sen. Mike Rounds, a more moderate South Dakota Republican, said he doesn’t “think anything would get done except lots of investigations and lots of accusations.”

What else we’re watching:

— LAWMAKERS CLAMOR FOR GAO v. TRUMP — Lawmakers are desperate for a government watchdog to step up and help them in their fight against the Trump administration over control of federal cash. The independent Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this week that the White House illegally withheld more than $1 billion for education and health care research programs — the latest in more than a half-dozen such findings GAO has published since the start of Trump’s second term. But the agency has yet to use its unique power to take the president to court to challenge those “impoundments,” and lawmakers who are tired of the administration running roughshod over their funding prerogatives want GAO to act.

— MURPHY’S DEFENSE FUNDING ULTIMATUM — Democrats should not approve Pentagon funding or the annual defense policy bill if they control Congress next year unless those bills would hasten the end of the Iran war, Sen. Chris Murphy told reporters Thursday. “We should make the end of the war a priority,” said the Foreign Relations Democrat who was returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Murphy also accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and officials of attempting a “cover-up” of the war’s damage and obscuring its true cost after he was denied entry on a base in Qatar. Given the damage to bases in the region, Murphy also told reporters that the U.S. should “reconsider its footprint” in the Middle East.

Jasper Goodman, Jennifer Scholtes and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.