Congress

With push from Trump, Republicans finally unite on spending

Published

1 year 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

Hegseth to brief House Republicans on White House goals for party-line package

Published

39 minutes ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scheduled to give a classified briefing Wednesday to a group of House Republicans about the administration’s goals for military funding and another party-line reconciliation bill, according to three people granted anonymity to describe a private meeting.

The gathering will take place during the Republican Study Committee’s weekly lunch and be held in the House SCIF, underscoring the potentially sensitive nature of Hegseth’s planned presentation.

Lawmakers are expected to also press Hegseth on the agreement the Trump administration has reached with Iran to end the war.

Congress

Turek leads Hinson in Iowa Senate poll of likely general election voters

Published

6 hours ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iowa Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek has a narrow lead over GOP rival Ashley Hinson in a new internal poll of likely general-election voters.

Turek leads Hinson 47 percent to 45 percent in the poll, conducted by Global Strategy Group from June 8-11 among 1,000 likely general election voters. The poll shows that Republicans have a 10-point edge in voter registration (42 percent to 32 percent) and an electorate that voted for Trump by 9 points (50 percent for Trump to 41 percent for Kamala Harris).

But the polling also shows President Donald Trump’s favorabilities underwater across the electorate, with 45 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable. Among registered independents, Trump is upside down 28 points.

Turek is “significantly outperforming the state’s underlying partisan dynamics,” Global Strategy Group’s Matt Canter & Ramzi Ebbini write in a memo first obtained by Blue Light News. “Republicans maintain substantial advantages in voter registration and party identification, yet Turek enters the general election ahead of Republican Ashley Hinson, with stronger personal favorability ratings, overperforming a generic Democrat, and with clear opportunities to expand his coalition as more voters become familiar with him.”

Some Republicans have acknowledged a concern about Iowa.

“There are some issues there that we got to deal with — the biggest one is trade — trade and tariffs,” said a Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the obstacles.

In his early general election messaging, Turek has leaned into farmers’ frustrations.

“Josh Turek is winning this race because Iowans are sick and tired of multi-millionaire politicians like Ashley Hinson who sell out working families while they get rich,” Turek for Iowa campaign manager Brendan Koch said in a statement first shared with Blue Light News. “We will spend the next 134 days connecting with Iowans in every corner of the state and across the political spectrum to send a fighter for the working class to the U.S. Senate.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP races to make Recon 3.0 real

Published

7 hours ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans have eight days to prove Reconciliation 3.0 might actually happen.

The House returns Tuesday with only eight legislative days before they break again for the July 4 holiday. If members want a realistic chance at fulfilling their self-imposed timeline for advancing the legislation before the end of July — when they pause work again for another five weeks — they need to move fast.

That means assembling, and then adopting, a budget resolution — the first step in unlocking the filibuster skirting power of the reconciliation process. It took Republicans months to advance such a blueprint during their two earlier reconciliation efforts this Congress.

House GOP leaders are tentatively planning another senior-level reconciliation meeting for Wednesday, according to three people involved in the talks granted anonymity to discuss private plans.

Still, the House is coming back with several other moving items to deal with this week, including promised briefings on the president’s Iran deal and a major housing affordability package GOP leadership wants to clear as soon as Wednesday.

Reconciliation talks also come as President Donald Trump is expected to join the Senate’s GOP lunch Wednesday, where he’ll likely continue pushing the chamber to pass his SAVE America Act or attach pieces of the GOP elections bill to the party-line legislation (an idea one of the bill’s biggest backers, Sen. Mike Lee, spiked Sunday).

Republicans involved with Reconciliation 3.0 discussions also warn they need to reach a final agreement on how to pay for the bill as well as what policy items will be included before GOP leaders can try to advance any budget resolution.

At this point, however, many fiscal hawks and at-risk incumbents are largely unhappy about how the discussions are coming along.

“It’s fake pay-fors for defense spending no one has fully agreed to and no meaningful reforms,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to discuss private talks.

Back on the other side of the Capitol, GOP senators have been in no rush to start working on a third party-line bill, especially as they are consumed with other political fires — like trying to confirm Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence to speed up a FISA reauthorization (more on that below).

Rep. Morgan Griffith said he was confident if the right policies are included in the House plan the Senate would then take it up — although he, too, acknowledged the challenges of a short timeline.

“If we do it right, yeah,” Griffith said. “There’s some interesting things out there that are being discussed that could make it a real possibility.”

What else we’re watching:

— OBAMA’S FEROCIOUS IRAN CRITIC SOFTER ON TRUMP DEAL: Tom Cotton, the No. 3 Senate Republican and chair of the chamber’s Intelligence panel, is not alone among GOP defense hawks in finding himself in an awkward position trying to defend Trump’s Iran deal after lambasting President Barack Obama’s a decade before. But the combination of his prior ferocity toward the Iranian regime and his current leadership responsibilities have put him into an especially tight spot.

— FIRST IN IC: DEMS WANT MORE OF JACK SMITH’S REPORT: Senate Judiciary Democrats are asking a federal court to unseal part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term. The request from the Senators comes as the Judiciary Committee is poised to call Smith to testify about his Biden-era cases before the end of this Congress. Republicans in the House and Senate have been investigating Smith’s work, alleging it amounted to a weaponization of the federal government against the then ex-president.

Jordain Carney and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.