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IN THIS EDITION

The November election is finally over. Now, about those Trump nominees

Inside the GOP leadership’s plans for government funding

House, Senate GOP clash over reconciliation timeline

House Republicans start jockeying for Intel spots

Slotkin, Curtis discuss plans for bipartisanship in next Senate

THE TOP

The November election is finally over. Now, about those Trump nominees

Happy Wednesday morning.

The 2024 elections finally ended on Tuesday night as Democrat Adam Gray officially defeated Rep. John Duarte (R-Calif.) in California’s 13th District. The margin of victory was 187 votes out of nearly 211,000 votes cast, or 0.08%.

The final House results are 220-215 in favor of Republicans. The GOP controlled 222 seats after Election Day 2022. This means Democrats netted a two-seat gain but still couldn’t claim the majority. Democrats flipped three seats each in California and New York, although it wasn’t enough to offset GOP gains in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

You won, so now welcome to your nightmare, Speaker Mike Johnson. For the first several months of 2025, Johnson will have a 217-215 seat majority when factoring in the resignation of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and the expected departure of Reps. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for Trump administration posts. Johnson, quite literally, has no margin for error.

Nominations: In public, Senate Republicans are giving President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees the benefit of the doubt, signaling a level of deference to the leader of their party while emphasizing the Senate’s advise-and-consent process.

Yet beneath the surface, several undercurrents paint a less rosy picture for some of Trump’s more controversial nominees.

Top Senate Republicans want to avoid offending Trump, who never forgets any slight. But there are GOP senators who don’t want to be forced to vote for unacceptable nominees just to mollify Trump, believing this will lead to more problems for him and them in the long run. These senators want their leadership to convince Trump to pull nominees rather than seek floor showdowns. This has happened already with Gaetz and DEA nominee Sheriff Chad Chronister — and it may again with Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth.

At the center of it all is incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Senate Republicans will have 53 seats come January and likely won’t get any Democratic help on the more controversial nominees. That means limiting GOP defections to no more than three.

Thune has spoken repeatedly with Trump about the challenges facing some of the president-elect’s nominees. And there have been staff-level conversations with incoming White House legislative affairs chief James Braid and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, among others. Vice President-elect JD Vance has also been directly involved and is in constant communication with his soon-to-be former colleagues.

At the same time, some moderate Republicans are talking informally about their approach to certain nominees, including Hegseth and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence. These senators are keeping Thune in the loop on their discussions and have no interest in blindsiding him — or Trump.

Republican leaders are also monitoring senators whose pet issues may put them on a collision course with any of the nominees, as well as a few others who don’t fit neatly into any camp.

By Tuesday night, Hegseth’s nomination was so endangered that the Wall Street Journal reported Trump is considering pulling Hegseth in favor of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis. Our friend Marc Caputo at the Bulwark reported that Trump and DeSantis also discussed having DeSantis appoint Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, to the Senate to replace departing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been nominated for secretary of state.

Hegseth and his mother, Penelope Hegseth — who wrote a 2018 email accusing her son of having “abused” women, although she later apologized — were set to be interviewed on Fox News today in a bid to save his nomination.

Zooming in: GOP senators to watch here include Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (La.). Sen.-elect John Curtis (R-Utah) is seen as another potential swing vote.

And don’t forget about Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the outgoing Senate GOP leader. We wrote last month about McConnell’s post-leadership posture and the possibility that he’d cause problems for Trump, especially on foreign policy-centric nominees and policy questions.

There’s also Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who’s up for reelection in 2026 but could draw a primary challenger from the right. Tillis has yet to indicate that he’ll oppose any of Trump’s nominees and hasn’t raised public doubts about any.

Tillis said Tuesday he doesn’t worry about potential backlash from the right or left.

“I will run on my record and show that I’m generally going to be supportive unless when I think things don’t make sense, and then I’ve got to go back home and explain that to people in North Carolina,” Tillis said. “So far my track record’s been pretty good on that.”

Hegseth back in the Senate: Hegseth has several critical meetings lined up for today. He’ll meet with Thune, as well as with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the incoming Senate Armed Services Committee chair, and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). Hegseth is meeting with the Republican Study Committee on the House side too.

Hegseth is also scheduled to sit down with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). Ernst has been generally supportive of Hegseth but has said she wants to ask him tough questions about the various allegations.

— Andrew Desiderio, John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman

Don’t miss: Our inaugural Tech Quarterly will go out later this morning. Check your inboxes and our website for the latest on the power, people and politics of tech policy, featuring exclusive interviews and breaking news.

The Daily Punch 🥊 With new episodes every weekday morning, The Daily Punch brings you inside Capitol Hill, the White House and Washington all in less than 15 minutes. Listen to today’s episode now.

THE STRATEGY

Inside the GOP leadership’s plans for government funding

House and Senate leaders are honing in on a CR that would keep government funded until late March.

Speaker Mike Johnson told us in a brief interview late Tuesday that he anticipates the stopgap funding bill will expire in late March 2025. A final decision is expected in the coming days.

Typical of the sunny optimism that Johnson has become known for, the speaker told us that his “hope and intention” is that House and Senate appropriators will finish their work on FY2025 spending bills “well before the deadline” in the first quarter of next year.

House and Senate leadership would like to wrap up a CR deal at some point this week. The government runs out of money on Dec. 20. The CR is expected to carry a disaster aid package and a one-year extension of the farm bill.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said no decisions have been made on the CR and he was out of the loop of the decision-making process. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on Appropriations, said top budget writers are “all of the view that the earlier” the CR expires in 2025 “the better.”

In an interesting twist, there’s now talk about inserting language in the CR that would transfer RFK Stadium from the federal government to the D.C. government. This move would allow the Washington Commanders to build a new stadium in D.C.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris met separately with Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Monday.

Johnson signaled that he is in favor of inserting this language.

“There’s a good possibility,” Johnson said. “It seems like a good idea to me.”

The WaPo reported that Maryland lawmakers are trying to get D.C. to trade one of their Air National Guard squadron in exchange for supporting the stadium bill.

Johnson said he’ll begin socializing all of this with the House GOP conference today.

Johnson met with the House Freedom Caucus members at their weekly meeting on Tuesday night to pitch his CR plan, which we first scooped.

HFC members pushed back heavily on Johnson’s proposal to attach a disaster aid package to the CR during their meeting. Reps. Bob Good (R-Va.), Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) asked for offsets for the aid package. The White House has requested nearly $99 billion in emergency disaster funding without offsets, although Congress is expected to approve far less.

Johnson, meanwhile, implied to members his current plan is the best path to help President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda next year in a GOP-run Washington.

– Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Mica Soellner

COMMITTEE SHAKEUP

House Republicans start jockeying for Intel spots

With three seats set to come open on the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Mike Johnson has some decisions to make about who to appoint to the secretive panel.

Several members across the GOP conference are eager to join the committee, including multiple lawmakers previously considered for a slot.

Johnson will have to replace Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who are leaving for the incoming Trump administration, as well as Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who lost his reelection bid.

Reps. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) and Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) are eyeing spots on the committee again. Bice has been making calls to several members to make the case for why she should get a seat.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) also didn’t rule out a chance to be on the committee, saying he would be a “positive addition,” given his decades-long Air Force career.

And the House Freedom Caucus is seeking to add more of its own members to the committee, as part of an effort to expand the ultraconservative group’s representation in top congressional panels. One HFC member told us the openings give them “a good opportunity” to lobby Johnson to recruit more hardliners to the committee.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) is said to be vying for a spot. Clyde didn’t directly tell us that he is interested in the committee, but he said the panel would be better served with more conservatives.

“We need more solid conservatives who are going to move forward the America First Agenda,” Clyde said.

Candidate quality: Johnson will be under scrutiny about who he taps after he faced pushback from some members for appointing two hardliners — Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) — to the panel earlier this year. Perry and Jackson replaced former Reps. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.).

Several members told us they expressed frustration with the speaker over those appointments.

Jackson was criticized over allegations that he drank on duty while serving as the lead White House physician, charges he denied. Members raised concerns about Perry being a target of the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The FBI seized the Pennsylvania Republican’s cellphone as part of its probe in 2022.

We also reported that Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) wasn’t given a heads-up before Johnson made the Jackson and Perry appointments.

But one committee member who initially had concerns with the two picks told us there haven’t been any issues with Perry and Jackson since they joined. However, there are still broad concerns about who else may get on.

“The key to this committee is having people who can work together and are not loud,” the member said. “We need people who take it seriously.”

– Mica Soellner

PUNCHBOWL NEWS EVENTS

Slotkin, Curtis discuss plans for bipartisanship in next Senate

Sens.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and John Curtis (R-Utah) called on lawmakers to embrace bipartisanship as the two get ready to transition to their new jobs as senators in the 119th Congress.

Slotkin and Curtis joined us Tuesday for a conversation about their hopes for working across the aisle in the next Congress and what issues they think can be tackled in a bipartisan way, including permitting reform.

If you missed the event, you can watch the full video here and read the recap here.

– Robert O’Shaughnessy

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