Welcome to 2026. It’s an election year, the five-year anniversary of Punchbowl News and the United States’ 250th birthday.
Punchbowl News has a slightly refreshed logo, as you can see at the top of the newsletter. You’ll also notice a bunch of tweaks across our brand to better align our look as PBN enters year six as a company. Five years in business. Wild. We’ll have more about that in the coming days.
The Senate returns to session Jan. 5, and the House is back Jan. 6. There are 305 days until the midterm elections. The government funding deadline is in 29 days.
President Donald Trump has spent the Christmas holiday at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump has focused on international affairs, holding high-stakes meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The United States is also involved in a quasi-military conflict in Venezuela, while deadly attacks on alleged “narco traffickers” continue.
Trump allies have played up allegations of fraud in Minnesota among members of the Somali community. This scandal has been unfolding for months — years — but only became a national story after right-wing journalists jumped on it recently. Now House GOP leaders are under pressure to act when Congress comes back into session.
One option being discussed among Republican aides is moving a bill to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship if found guilty of defrauding the federal government, a far lower bar than the current standard for “revocation of citizenship.” It’s not clear if this is possible or even legal.
Obamacare. For our audience, Jan. 1 means we’ve gone over the Obamacare cliff. Congress has officially allowed the enhanced ACA premium subsidies to expire. Millions of Americans will either lose their coverage or face dramatically higher premiums. Even conservative media outlets are hammering Trump and Hill Republicans over this one.
In the House, next week will bring a vote on a three-year clean extension of the ACA subsidies. That will almost certainly pass, barring some massive surprise, although it won’t get through the Senate. Speaker Mike Johnson has also said that he intends to spend much of the next few months working to fix a “broken health care system.”
In the Senate, bipartisan Obamacare talks continued throughout the holiday break. As we scooped, Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) convened a bipartisan group of nine senators by phone on Tuesday. They plan to meet again in person next week.
Moreno and Collins have a proposal to extend the ACA subsidies for two years with income caps and anti-fraud reforms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune will have a big decision on whether to move ahead if the proposal picks up more GOP support.
There’d also need to be enough Senate Democrats willing to cut a deal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been downplaying the possibility of a bipartisan agreement. Schumer said Wednesday that Republicans “had multiple chances” to cut an Obamacare deal before the subsidies expired.
The White House believes that there’s an appetite in the Senate for a compromise, possibly an amended version of a House-passed Obamacare subsidies extension that includes program reforms.
Should that happen, it would reignite the question of whether Johnson will put a compromise on the floor. That will be a major debate in GOP leadership circles.
There are really three camps in the House Republican Conference at the moment. The first represents the majority point of view: that the GOP can’t ever win a health-care fight with Democrats, so they should do nothing about the expired subsidies.
Another group, best represented by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), thinks it’s time for Republicans to aim for a major health care overhaul.
The third faction is made up of moderate Republicans, who think it’s a political and policy disaster that the GOP has allowed the subsidies to expire. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told us on Fly Out Day that the three-year extension was “bullshit” and the Senate would eventually amend it.
Obamacare on the air. Over the Christmas recess, several senators were subject to ads in their states urging them to extend the subsidies, saying that the GOP majorities depend on it.
“If [Congress doesn’t extend the subsidies], premiums will double, families will lose coverage and Republicans will lose in 2026,” the ad says.
These spots are airing in local markets targeting GOP Sens. Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Roger Marshall (Kan.), John Hoeven (N.D.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Katie Britt (Ala.) and Jon Husted (Ohio), in addition to Moreno and Collins.
Here’s the ad that ran in Alaska. It’s similar in other markets.
Government funding. The other huge issue facing Congress is government funding. The CR that ended the disastrous government shutdown expires on Jan. 30. House and Senate GOP appropriators reached a deal on an FY2026 spending topline before leaving town in December.
The “Four Corners” — the top House and Senate appropriators in both parties — are negotiating over the nine outstanding bills, and there’s general agreement on toplines, although not a formal deal. That means spending levels are far closer to what the Senate wants than House Republicans. House Republican leadership sources say the chamber could consider spending bills next week. We’ll see if they can get it together to do that.
We’ll note that Democratic leaders aren’t linking the spending bills to the Obamacare subsidies fight, as they did back in October. However, that doesn’t mean a shutdown is out of the question. There’s still a long way to go.
One big issue to watch is Trump’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. This, plus other moves, has set off a war with Colorado lawmakers.
