News: The DCCC raised $9.5 million in January, a record for the first month of an off year. House Democrats, who outraised Republicans all last cycle, need to flip only a few seats to win the majority in 2026.
House is in the house. President Donald Trump’s decision to back the House’s budget resolution is a big victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been engaged in a cold war with Senate Republicans over both strategy and tactics on enacting the GOP agenda.
Trump’s pronouncement Wednesday that he preferred Johnson’s “one big beautiful bill” to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) narrow spending blueprint has shifted the balance of power decidedly toward the House — for now.
Despite Trump’s comments, Senate Republicans are moving ahead with their budget resolution, but it’s widely seen as a backup plan for now. We expect a Senate vote-a-rama to begin this evening and last through the early morning hours of Friday.
The fate of Trump’s legislative agenda – and how fast it passes — now falls directly on the 53-year-old Johnson, who has done everything in his power to line up with the president.
Trump’s decision came as a surprise to almost everyone in the Capitol, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who said he wasn’t given a heads up by the White House. Trump had kept everyone guessing about his true intentions, saying on multiple occasions that he didn’t care about whether it was one package or two.
In an interview Wednesday, Johnson said he never doubted Trump’s preference, even if the speaker did think that Senate Republicans “underestimated the challenge” the House faces.
“I think [Trump] fully understands the complexity of our task in the House with a very ambitious, aggressive legislative agenda and a very small margin with which to do it. …
“For the first time in memory, the Senate Republicans have a larger margin than we do in the House. So and then, by necessity, the House has to drive the agenda,” Johnson said.
Yet Thune vowed to plow ahead with passing his own budget resolution, which includes $340 billion in new Pentagon and border-security money, including funding for Trump’s border wall between the United States and Mexico. The Senate package would also make changes to federal energy policy and is fully offset by cuts in mandatory spending.
So Trump is giving Johnson the space to try to pass his resolution, but will have the Senate working in the background in case Johnson fails.
“We believe that the president also likes optionality,” Thune told reporters Wednesday. “Hopefully we’ll be able to, whether it’s one bill or two bills, to get all of the things the president has outlined… across the finish line.”
Vance’s play. There are those in the White House — Vice President JD Vance among them — who view the Senate’s process as more efficient. The Senate wants to hand Trump an early victory while pushing a thorny debate on extending the 2017 tax cuts to later this year.
As we scooped, Vance said multiple times during a closed-door GOP lunch Wednesday that he’s “not telling you what to do” and that Trump is fine with the Senate’s track as a “plan B.” Vance told Republicans that Trump “won’t attack you” for moving forward with Graham’s budget resolution.
But Vance’s posture frustrated some senators who still see the issue as unresolved. Multiple GOP senators told us they believe Vance is on their side but was simply trying to manage Trump’s public alignment with the House rather than get everyone on the same page.
As for timing, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told us Wednesday that he expects the House Republicans to pass their budget resolution next week. Johnson said it may take “a few more days” after next week.
Other reconciliation news. A few other items stuck out from our conversation with Johnson.
1) The speaker said he isn’t concerned about Trump telling Sean Hannity on Fox News that he doesn’t want to touch Medicaid but rather rid the hugely popular program of waste, fraud and abuse:
“We have a stewardship obligation to root that out and to eliminate it and to ensure that the people who are receiving it are actually eligible to do so. There’s been talk about enhancements and work requirements for able-bodied workers and that kind of stuff. But it’s just all theoretical at this point,” Johnson said.
2) We asked Johnson about one of the biggest challenges he has to solve: how to extend the 2017 tax rates with just $4.5 trillion in spending cuts to offset any tax changes. Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and other tax writers have been skeptical this is enough space to renew those rates. Plus, Trump has other priorities he is asking for: the elimination of tax on tips, Social Security and overtime pay; adjusting the deduction tap on state and local taxes; eliminating tax breaks for sports team owners; and closing the carried interest loophole.
The speaker said he’s waiting on a few developments “that might have a big effect” on the reconciliation bill, namely the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the tariffs Trump has instituted, as well as formally quantifying any savings from DOGE.
