Congress is back, Republicans gearing up for trifecta government

Congress came back to Washington on Jan. 3 to officially swear-in Members for the 2025-26 cycle. This was also President Trump and Speaker Johnson’s first real test of their razor-thin majority–could Republicans avoid another debacle in their efforts to elect the next Speaker of the House? The answer was a tepid ‘yes’. Speaker Johnson was on track to lose the first ballot, with six Republican holdouts when he could only afford one. However, votes on the House floor can be kept open for an indefinite amount of time as long as the House remains in session. So that’s what they did. After the initial vote, three Republicans immediately switched their vote, in what was likely a planned ‘protest’ vote. Johnson then worked to eventually convince two other Members to switch their vote. While he was technically successful (he was elected in a 218-215 vote), this is a likely preview of what we can expect for major floor votes in the months ahead.

As for the months ahead, Republicans are currently huddling over exactly how they are going to accomplish their legislative agenda. We know that they want to pass legislation aimed at controlling the U.S.-Mexico border, expanding U.S. energy production, and extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts. The issue at hand is how. Trump has expressed interest in one large bill, which he acknowledged might take longer. Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate are concerned that it might be difficult to pass one bill, and that Senate rules could delay the process, denying Republicans and Trump an early legislative victory in 2025. They have to decide ASAP because they are using the expedited ‘reconciliation’ process in the Senate to avoid the 60-vote filibuster, and that process requires them to pass an ‘outline’ of what they hope to achieve before they vote on the actual bill. 

Notably, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has reinforced his line in the sand on getting rid of the filibuster: a hard ‘no’. Conservatives have acknowledged that the majority of proposals that they hope to pass on border security could be ruled as not primarily budgetary issues, which would make them ineligible for the reconciliation process. There have been some suggestions that Republicans should change the rules for what qualifies under reconciliation, but Thune put that idea to rest saying: “that’s totally akin to killing the filibuster. We can’t go there.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have been strategically avoiding discussion about Trump’s campaign promises on tariffs. The Washington Post ran an article at the beginning of the month suggesting that Trump aides are looking at imposing tariffs from every country on “key imports,” rather than across the board tariffs on every good from every country. Trump immediately refuted the article on social media, but it is hard to gauge the seriousness of that comment. Aside from this minor commentary, Republican legislators are staying uncharacteristically quiet, and it is still too early to tell how far Trump will go on this issue.