The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

Johnson’s dilemma: Inside the speaker’s tough end-of-year decisions

Republicans’ Ukraine split-screen

Vulnerable Dems find footing on border messaging

The Vault: Jordan presses CFTC on political betting

THE TOP

Johnson’s dilemma: Inside the speaker’s tough end-of-year decisions

Happy Thursday morning.

Speaker Mike Johnson is in an extraordinarily unenviable position.

More than 10 months into his speakership, Johnson finds himself in the same pickle that’s plagued his GOP predecessors. For Johnson — a real movement conservative who has a good relationship with former President Donald Trump — the experience as a Republican speaker was supposed to be different. Yet it’s exactly the same.

With just 19 days until the federal funding deadline, Johnson is pushing a bill that most lawmakers and Congress watchers understand is dead on arrival — a six-month stopgap package with the SAVE Act attached to it. The stated objective is to ensure election integrity, which Johnson termed a “righteous” pursuit and Trump says is needed to save the country. The practical objective is to try to establish a House GOP negotiating position in the face of unified Democratic and White House opposition.

Johnson’s detractors are aplenty — especially inside the House Republican leadership, where the speaker’s seemingly earnest determination is being met quietly with sneers, jeers and head shaking.

Just days after Johnson unveiled his proposal, he pulled it from consideration Wednesday. The speaker announced that he’d deputized House Majority Whip Tom Emmer to try to convince the more than a dozen Republicans who are opposed to support the bill.

“This is his priority,” Emmer responded when asked if Johnson’s task was doable. “And he’s leaning in on it.”

But is it doable? “Everything’s doable,” Emmer insisted.

With all due respect to Emmer, not everything is doable. And there’s lots of evidence that the path of least resistance — a clean funding bill until mid-December — is where the House will end up.

However, please consider Johnson’s plight for a moment.

– The Louisiana Republican has Trump demanding that he should shut down the government unless Democrats agree to the SAVE Act. Yet Johnson told us in an interview this week that he doesn’t believe federal agencies should shut down. Even Trump’s top allies on the Hill — such as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — don’t want that either.

– The speaker has a tiny majority and a GOP that’s deeply divided on both its goals and the strategy for achieving them.

– Johnson faces an election in 54 days, where his fragile majority is at risk.

– On the other side of Nov. 5, Johnson faces a potentially brutal lame duck session. How that session goes depends largely on what happens on Election Day. There are too many variables to get into everything here. But let’s just say government funding may be the simplest of his worries then.

– And at some point during that lame-duck period, Johnson faces an internal GOP election of his own, either for speaker or House minority leader. Johnson will have to justify the decisions he made as speaker and the election results.

So Johnson’s handling of the CR is more than just a straightforward tactical decision. It has implications for how the rest of the year will go and could help determine Johnson’s station in the leadership.

Asked how much Johnson’s spending strategy will factor into the future leadership race, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who is against the CR, told us: “Heavily… We can’t keep doing it this way.”

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) predicted Johnson would hang on to power if Republicans keep the House and Trump wins the White House.

But on the flip side, “It’s going to be difficult” for Johnson if that doesn’t happen, Jackson added.

“There’s going to be a big shakeup [in leadership] if we lose the House, and certainly if we lose the House and the White House,” Jackson said in an interview.

In the PM edition Wednesday night, we ran down what Johnson’s options are to resolve this mess — and yes, it’s a mess.

In short, Johnson can try to get a six-month clean CR through the House. This would help him avoid a gigantic omnibus at year’s end.

But losing the SAVE Act would cause him flack on the right. Plus, the House would need to approve a pricey set of anomalies, provisions that provide funding to specific federal programs during the covered period.

Johnson could shorten the stopgap bill to three months and continue to insist on the SAVE Act. Yet that would still be dead on arrival in the Senate and would also lose conservatives like Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who told us he’d only support the six-month timeframe.

That’s why a clean three-month CR is widely seen as inevitable at this point. Yet that also carries serious risks for Johnson. That means he’d be trying to cut a deal with Democrats on a massive end-of-year spending package that conservatives will hate while also trying to convince those same conservatives to keep him in power.

It’s way too early to get deep into just who could challenge Johnson. But many Republicans look at Jordan — who has run for both speaker and minority leader in the past — as a prime candidate. We asked Jordan what Johnson should do.

“We gotta get the votes, this is obvious,” Jordan said. “Get the votes, put it on the floor.”

— Jake Sherman and Melanie Zanona

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WASHINGTON X THE WORLD

Republicans’ Ukraine split-screen

Republican national-security leaders on Capitol Hill want the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to strike deeper into Russian territory. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, won’t even say if he wants Ukraine to win the war, and he endorsed a plan that would likely require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in order to end the conflict.

And that was just on Tuesday.

But few Republicans are publicly acknowledging — and most are downplaying — the massive gulf between Trump and GOP defense hawks on an issue that’s divided the party and will continue to be a pressure point into 2025.

“Debates can be fairly chaotic. So there may be further explanation or things that he might have said that he couldn’t say in the time allowed,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on Trump’s Ukraine comments during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “So I frankly wouldn’t make that much of it.”

Trump was asked twice on Tuesday night whether he wants Ukraine to win the war. Both times Trump said only that he wants the war to “end.”

Republicans aren’t going to say anything to undermine Trump or worsen the party’s divisions this close to the election. This is especially true for Senate Republicans, whose candidates in battleground states want to tie their fortunes to Trump’s. Many of those candidates are running behind Trump. So they need Trump more than he needs them.

A polar-opposite view: Just a few hours before Trump refused to endorse a Ukrainian victory, dozens of lawmakers — including House Republicans who chair national-security committees — formally demanded that President Joe Biden lift remaining restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). This would give Ukraine’s military an edge as it looks to bolster an ongoing offensive inside Russia.

A slew of Republicans, including Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, signed a separate letter arguing that lifting the ATACMS restrictions would “fully enable Ukraine to achieve victory.”

But Trump’s stated plan could hardly be considered a victory for Ukraine. Trump has long telegraphed a desire to end the war through peace talks, which would almost certainly advantage Russia.

Still, Republicans indicated they were fine with Trump’s response. Here’s what Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a Ukraine supporter who stumped for Trump in the debate spin room, told us:

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said he thinks Trump is trying to be a peace broker for the region: “I may have expressed it differently myself, but I can understand where he’s coming from.”

And Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who’s among the Senate’s most vocal Ukraine backers, gave Trump credit for not trying to derail the $60 billion Ukraine aid package that Congress approved earlier this year.

“He could use maybe more nuanced language, but the fact of the matter is, without his tacit support for a $64 billion supplemental, it would not have happened,” Tillis added.

Other Republicans weren’t so quick to rationalize Trump’s comments. Senate Minority Whip John Thune said “We want Ukraine to win the war for sure,” and noted that a majority of GOP senators supported the last Ukraine aid bill.

Pro-Ukraine Republicans called for continued U.S. backing.

“Ukraine’s the victim. They’re trying to be a democracy. They’re trying to embrace free markets,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said. “We should support that. We should be unambiguous.”

— Andrew Desiderio and Max Cohen

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Vulnerable Dems find footing on border messaging

Frontline House Democrats are confident they’ve finally found a cohesive message on border security and immigration after being hammered on it by Republicans all cycle.

Democrats in tough races are connecting Republicans to former President Donald Trump’s role in killing the bipartisan Senate border security bill. After the Senate effort failed earlier this year, Democrats promised to make it an issue in the campaign. Now we’re seeing them follow through on this.

Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) said Republicans’ refusal to take up the bipartisan proposal makes their attacks on Democrats less salient.

“Republicans are disqualified on the issue,” Lee told us. “It was negotiated and they got their marching orders from the former president.”

How they’re messaging it: During the presidential debate Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Trump of trying to run on the border issue rather than fixing it. And multiple Democratic candidates have run ads in recent weeks blaming Trump and Republicans for tanking the bill, saying they’re responsible for exacerbating the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

– In an ad this week, Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum, who is running against Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), said her opponent went along with Trump to defeat the “toughest border bill in our nation’s history.”

– Kirsten Engel, challenging Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), also tied Ciscomani to killing the border bill in an August ad, saying the freshman “played politics” instead of protecting his constituents.

– Another ad supporting Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) from House Majority PAC, the Democratic leadership-aligned super PAC, touts the fact that Davis went to the border three times, as well as his efforts to work across the aisle to tackle border security.

What’s next: Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Democrats’ border security task force, said he’s been advising members on how to effectively carry that message into Election Day. Suozzi flipped a red seat earlier this year in part because of how he countered Republicans’ border-related attacks.

“If you listen to Vice President Harris and other Democrats, they’re adopting the message that we should have done the bipartisan deal,” Suozzi told us. “Even though we didn’t get everything we wanted in the bipartisan Senate deal, we have to support something like that.”

Suozzi said the group will likely meet next week for the first time since before August recess. He’s also teamed up with Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) to host town hall meetings about how to work across the aisle to find solutions on border security.

Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.), who is part of the task force, said members have looked to Suozzi as a leader on the issue.

“[Suozzi] flipped his seat by leaning in on this very issue, so sometimes our vulnerabilities can be a strength if we address them head on,” Budzinski told us. “It’s top of mind for voters what’s happening with immigration and so by ignoring it, that’s to our own detriment.”

Frontline Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said the border bill-themed Democratic attacks are effective because “it happens to be true and believable.”

“The only reason we didn’t vote on it was because Trump sabotaged the whole thing,” Landsman told us. “All he knew was it would be bad for him politically, and so no vote.”

Republicans aren’t easing their immigration-focused attacks on Democrats. As we reported this week, the top House GOP super PAC is running new ads blaming Democrats for failing to stop President Joe Biden’s “open border” policies.

The most endangered House Democrats also joined with Republicans earlier this summer when voting for a resolution that condemned Harris’ “open-border policies.” Criticisms of Harris as the Biden administration “border czar” is still an effective line of attack for Republicans.

— Mica Soellner and Max Cohen

The Vault: Jordan presses CFTC on political betting

First in The Vault: House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) took aim at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam on Wednesday, suggesting the agency overstepped its statutory authority with its 2023 crackdown on political betting.

In a letter addressed to Behnam, Jordan criticized the CFTC’s decision to block Kalshi, a predictions market company, from allowing U.S. customers to bet on American election results.

“The CFTC’s order against Kalshi raises concerns that the CFTC is acting outside of its statutory and regulatory authority,” Jordan wrote. “The CFTC’s actions also indicate the agency may be engaging in regulation by enforcement.”

Jordan told the CFTC his committee would be investigating the agency’s actions and requested a staff-level briefing. Read the full letter here.

The letter comes at a tense moment for the CFTC and Kalshi. Just last week, a federal judge threw out the market regulator’s 2023 decision to prevent Kalshi from allowing users to bet on who would take control of Congress in the upcoming election.

The CFTC subsequently filed an emergency motion asking for a two-week stay pending an appeal, which Judge Jia Cobb will weigh at a hearing later today. A CFTC spokesperson declined to comment on the letter.

— Brendan Pedersen

NEW DEM COALITION

News: Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.) is running for vice chair of the New Democrat Coalition.

In a pitch to colleagues, Budzinski notes her experiences being a freshman leadership representative for the group and her work managing member and staff relations.

“Serving on NDC Leadership has been a highlight of my time in Congress, and it would be an honor to put this experience to work as a Vice Chair next term,” Budzinski wrote.

Reps. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) and Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) are both running for chair of the center-left group. Davids officially announced her bid on Wednesday.

Current Chair Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) is retiring.

In campaign news: Democrat Will Rollins is running a new digital ad featuring a Marine veteran who slams Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) as a corrupt, self-serving politician. The 41st District race is quickly becoming one of the most expensive House seats in the nation.

— Mica Soellner

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