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May 23, 2025
Presented by UL Standards & Engagement
The bipartisan Setting Consumer Standards for Lithium-Ion Batteries Act will keep uncertified batteries off the market and out of homes — reducing the fire risk and preserving consumer access. It passed the House by an overwhelming majority. Now it’s the Senate’s turn to make a smart decision to protect Americans.
PRESENTED BY
THE TOP
Johnson and Scalise dish on reconciliation
Happy Friday morning.
Throughout the monthslong process of passing the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act in the House, we’ve learned a lot about many of the key figures we track closely. It was an exhausting but illuminating five-month sprint.
We caught up with Speaker Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and members of the House Freedom Caucus on Thursday following their vote. We wanted to share insights from these conversations and discuss what it means for governing in Washington.
Speaker Mike Johnson. The speaker deserves a good deal of credit for executing an incredibly difficult task – rallying a GOP conference split sharply along ideological lines around a mammoth tax and spending bill filled with a wide range of priorities.
“I think I anticipated the speed bumps that we would encounter along the way,” Johnson told us Thursday afternoon.
Johnson has tremendous patience, a huge asset in his job. We joke that his tenure should be called the “stay tuned speakership” because he’s always shuttling between different constituencies, trying to resolve conflicts.
Other Republicans told us the speaker takes verbal abuse quite well. This is a marked difference from past speakers. Johnson doesn’t get angry when people get angry at him – which happened quite frequently during the negotiations on this package.
“I can have somebody completely unload on me, and I can look through that and say, ‘You know what? I love that guy. I love that guy. I love her,’” Johnson said.
The Louisiana Republican continued: “I give a lot of grace to people. Because there’s another thing the Bible says: ‘The measure of mercy you give is the measure of mercy you ultimately receive.’”
During the White House meeting Tuesday between Johnson, the GOP leadership team, the House Freedom Caucus and President Donald Trump, tensions were running high – “intense fellowship” as Johnson puts it. Trump left the room with the issues unresolved.
Johnson said OMB Director Russ Vought and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) were able to lower the temperature and get the Freedom Caucus to a good place.
“Especially in these times of great stress and high anxiety, if the leader, if the speaker, throws his hands up and walks out, the whole thing melts down,” Johnson said.
What’s next on reconciliation, for the moment, is out of Johnson’s hands. Senate Republicans are already promising to put their own mark on the bill. Johnson says he has no “pride of authorship.” But the Senate often does.
Johnson wants the Senate to “fine tune this product as little as possible.” He likened his task in the House to “crossing over the Grand Canyon on a piece of dental floss.”
“In times past, Senate and House chambers were pitted against one another, but we don’t have the luxury of that,” Johnson said. “It’s got to be a one team approach.”
Then there’s Trump. The president helped Johnson stay in the speaker’s chair, keep government funded, pass a budget and now clear the reconciliation package. The knock on Johnson from some corners of the conference is that he can’t get anything done without Trump.
Yet every speaker faces a similar dynamic with a president from their own party. With Trump, of course, it’s a daily thing because he makes so much of governing about him and what he wants.
“President Trump is a singular figure,” Johnson told us. “He may be the most powerful president in terms of his stature. It’s earned. … And when you get to know him well, as I do, you understand it. And so he has a tremendous sway.”
President Donald Trump. The reconciliation package wouldn’t have gotten through the House without Trump.
Trump didn’t negotiate the finer details of FMAP, the cost of SALT over the 10-year budget window or get in the weeds on clean-energy policies.
But Trump didn’t throw wrenches into the process either – and that’s different from 2017. For instance, Trump understood, when it was presented to him, that closing the carried-interest loophole didn’t have the votes to pass.
Trump also didn’t allow individual groups of members to go around Johnson or Scalise by using direct appeals to him, although the Freedom Caucus tried. This was a huge problem during Trump’s first term. Trump still talks to anyone who calls, but that doesn’t mean that he undermines GOP congressional leaders. At least not yet.
Most importantly, Trump knew when it was time to stop negotiating. He delivered that message very forcefully to the HFC at the White House Tuesday, eventually leading to the high-stakes Thursday morning vote.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. Scalise is now the elder statesman of the House Republican leadership team – and it shows. The 59-year-old Louisiana Republican tries to steer the debate to where he thinks it needs to go for the conference to be successful.
Scalise and Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) were very early adopters of the “one-bill strategy.” Scalise convinced Trump of that wisdom, bucking some White House staff.
Scalise was almost always in the room with Johnson as they were working the different factions inside the GOP conference.
“The speaker and I were very disciplined not to promise things just to get a couple of votes,” Scalise told us.
House Freedom Caucus. As always, the Freedom Caucus was on a bit of a rollercoaster ride over the last few weeks. They demanded FMAP changes for Medicaid, and then backed off in the face of heated opposition.They demanded per-capita caps, only to drop that later.
Most of the GOP conference deserves credit for recognizing that the votes simply weren’t there for the policies they were demanding. HFC Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) voted present, which is a bit of a cop out but did allow the measure to pass.
The Republican Conference is a bit sick of their song and dance, though. Just look at what Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said after the vote.
– Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan
NEW: As GOP lawmakers lean heavily into legislative priorities they say will spur medical innovation, our second feature of The Future of Medicine, in partnership with Incubate, focuses on the legislative and regulatory landscape. Check it out.
ICYMI, read our first feature on the state of play in this rapidly-changing industry.
THE SENATE
Get ready. It’s the Senate’s turn
The Senate wants to put its “imprint” on the House-passed budget reconciliation package, in the words of Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Senate Republicans largely agree with him. The big question is how far they’ll ultimately go.
The chamber has to contend with the Byrd Rule, the process of ensuring every provision complies with budget reconciliation guidelines. And Senate Republicans each have their own ideas about how drastically they want to change the House bill.
But Thune can only afford to lose three GOP senators, so making dramatic changes is a major risk for the whip count.
“I don’t think we’ll tear down the whole house,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former House member. “We may go in and repaint some of the interior walls and maybe some of the interior decorations. We’ll make sure we put our fingerprints on it.”
One of the biggest questions through this process has been whether Senate committees will do their own markups. Thune told us in an interview that’s definitely in the cards, arguing “you can improve the product” by going through regular order. This is especially true on the tax side, although every change senators make risks losing House GOP votes.
Plus, the Senate is trying to meet an aggressive July 4 goal for getting the bill to the president’s desk. Congress needs to raise the debt limit by August recess, and Republicans plan to do that in the reconciliation bill.
The big question marks: The Senate has a significant contingent of Republicans who don’t want deep cuts to Medicaid spending. A handful of senators oppose aggressive repeals of IRA clean energy tax credits.
On the other end, several hardline conservatives want deeper spending cuts. And no one in the Senate GOP likes SALT.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), whose panel handles taxes and Medicaid, said senators will have to comb through everything. The House-passed reconciliation bill is over 1,000 pages. There’s a lot for senators to love, hate or demand be overhauled.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said the Senate probably needs to find more spending cuts to assuage conservatives. Tillis also said there must be changes to how the House handled clean energy tax credit repeals from the Inflation Reduction Act — which could cause a loss in revenue and anger House conservatives.
“It’s a good start, but we have work to do,” Tillis said.
Trump and the Senate: The president doesn’t have quite as much sway with senators as he does with House members. That’s not to say Senate Republicans won’t ultimately fold under pressure from President Donald Trump. But the political dynamics are different.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) hasn’t been afraid to speak out against Trump lately. Johnson insisted that while like-minded House members may have buckled under pressure from Trump out of fear of a primary challenge, he won’t.
“Those guys want to keep their seats, I understand the pressure,” Johnson said. “He can’t pressure me that way. I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging our children’s future.”
Regardless, Trump’s involvement in the Senate process will be key — even if it may be calibrated differently.
— Andrew Desiderio, Laura Weiss and Max Cohen
HOUSE OVERSIGHT
What’s next for House Oversight Dems
The death of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) this week leaves a vacancy on the House Oversight Committee with no clear front-runner to fill it.
Democrats on the panel had been quietly positioning for the slot since Connolly announced in April that he would be stepping aside amid a battle with esophageal cancer. For now, there are four candidates angling for the spot: Reps. Stephen Lynch (Mass), 70; Kweisi Mfume (Md.), 76; Robert Garcia (Calif.), 47; and Jasmine Crockett (Texas), 44.
Yet none of them have the inside track and others could still enter the race.
This is an influential post inside the Democratic Caucus and one of the main party bulwarks against President Donald Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress. It’s a perch that only grows in stature if Democrats take back the House next year.
The state of the race: Lynch is currently ranking Democrat on the panel, per Connolly’s request, and he has said Connolly planned to endorse him as a successor. But he’s been passed over for the top job before.
Garcia could start from a position of strength if he can lock up the massive California delegation and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Crockett or Garcia, both elected in 2022, would usher in the generational change that the party’s base has been demanding.
Both Mfume and Crockett are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, though Mfume is more senior. Crockett had previously suggested she might step aside for Mfume.
But Mfume’s age could also be a factor here. Democrats continue to deal with the fallout around former President Joe Biden’s age and his initial decision to run for reelection. The caucus has pushed for younger members to fill other key committee posts. And three House Democrats have died since March.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), an Oversight member, said this week that he wouldn’t run and instead backed Mfume.
“Certainly the reason that I’m not running is because of my respect for him,” he said.
But few others have made endorsements. And out of respect for Connolly, campaigning ground to a halt on Wednesday with news of his death.
Looking ahead: Caucus rules say the election for a new ranking member must be held within 30 days of the vacancy, although a waiver could grant extra time. There are two weeks of recess slotted in the next month, compressing the timeline for a vote.
Yet given the important role the top Democrat on Oversight plays in crafting the party’s resistance to Trump, some members and aides told us they’re ready to fill the post quickly.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) challenged Connolly for the position in December, pitting a progressive star and impressive communicator against a more senior member. Ocasio-Cortez lost to Connolly in a caucus-wide vote of 131-84.
Ocasio-Cortez has said she doesn’t plan to run for the position again, though we’ve heard from several Democratic lawmakers and senior aides who hope she reconsiders.
— Ally Mutnick
PRESENTED BY ELECTRONIC PAYMENTS COALITION
Mega-grocers hiked prices during the pandemic and now want to profit even more with credit card mandates.
Oppose the Durbin-Marshall Credit Card Mandates.
THE CAMPAIGN
Barrasso, Penske to join Moreno at Indy 500
The Senate is on recess, so get ready for a ton of fundraisers over the next week.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso and auto racing mogul Roger Penske will headline a fundraiser for Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) at the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday.
See the invitation here. The fundraiser will benefit Moreno’s campaign, the NRSC and the Ohio Republican Party.
Barrasso traveled extensively last year to raise money and campaign for GOP Senate candidates, like Moreno, who helped deliver Republicans their majority.
— Andrew Desiderio
PUNCHBOWL NEWS EVENTS
ICYMI: Loeffler on reconciliation, tariffs, SBA goals
Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler joined a Punchbowl News event on Thursday, where she discussed several issues, including the potential impact of the House-passed reconciliation bill.
The former Georgia senator also weighed in on the Trump administration’s tariffs and shared her SBA priorities.
You can watch the full recording here.
– Samantha Handler
…AND THERE’S MORE
The Campaign. The Modern Skies Coalition – a collection of business groups and aviation concerns – is running a new ad in D.C. asking Congress to upgrade air traffic control infrastructure. The spot talks about technology from the 1980s and says that air traffic control systems in the U.S. still operate on floppy disks.
Watch the ad here.
BRIDGE PAC, Rep. Jim Clyburn’s (D-S.C.) leadership PAC, has its Charleston, S.C., event this weekend. The event will run you $5,000 per person.
– Jake Sherman
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Presented by UL Standards & Engagement
E-bike fires are happening across the country, costing lives and forcing families out of their homes. The Senate can help stop these fires and protect Americans. The bipartisan Setting Consumer Standards for Lithium-Ion Batteries Act will keep uncertified batteries off the market, reducing the risk.
