By: Audrey Fahlberg – nationalreview.com – January 1, 2025

Republicans enter 2025 with a D.C. trifecta, but the narrow House majority means that enacting at least some of the president-elect’s ambitious agenda items will be difficult.

Congressional Republican leaders spent the post-election period before Christmas strategizing how to push Donald Trump’s immigration, tax-, energy-, and defense-related agenda items across the finish line this year.

But even though Republicans enter 2025 with a trifecta in Washington, the narrow nature of this year’s House GOP majority means that following through on at least some of the president-elect’s ambitious agenda items will be difficult.

House GOP leaders will ring in the new year with a 219–215 majority that is slated to grow slimmer still. Representatives Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y) are leaving Capitol Hill to take high-profile jobs in the Trump administration, and Representative Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) — the president-elect’s first pick to lead the Justice Department, who later withdrew from consideration — has also resigned.

Until their seats are filled, House Republicans will be left with a nightmare scenario: a 217–215 majority that will continue to test Speaker Mike Johnson’s ability to govern a fractious GOP conference and get major bills to the president-elect’s desk. Those numbers are already tempering some members’ post-election optimism about unified control in Washington this Congress.

“The White House won a significant election. The American people want us to get things done,” says Representative Dan Meuser (R., Pa.). He expects the White House to put immense pressure on any GOP members who abuses this year’s 217–205 majority by holding big-ticket legislative items hostage on the House floor. “I really don’t want to hear 100 issues in a bill, and for one reason, they’re going to oppose it in the end,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said in a recent interview with NR of his House GOP colleagues. “Whoever does that, hell, I’ll oppose them in their primary.”

Before congressional leaders can kick off this year’s Congress, lawmakers must first elect a speaker. Johnson enters 2025 with a fresh endorsement from Trump ahead of this week’s speaker election on January 3 — three days before lawmakers are slated to certify the 2024 election results in a joint session of Congress. “Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN,” Trump wrote in a Monday evening social-media post.

The continued show of support from Trump is a boon to the Louisianan’s reelection chances after a nasty pre-Christmas government funding fight on Capitol Hill that infuriated fiscal hawks in Congress.

Before lawmakers went home for the holidays, Johnson tried to push through a bipartisan 1,547-page bill filled with enough Democratic sweeteners to cause Trump, vice-president elect JD Vance, and billionaire Trump confidant Elon Musk to tank the bill. But then a second, 116-page legislative attempt went down in flames in part because Johnson — at the urging of Trump — included legislative language to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling for two years, turning off debt hardliners who are always wary of increasing or suspending the country’s borrowing limit.

Hours before government funding was set to expire, Johnson finally muscled through a government funding bill that mirrored the second version but nixed the Trump-preferred debt limit provision. That means at the start of Trump’s term, congressional Republicans will have yet another government funding fight and debt ceiling spat on their hands.

One of those infuriated fiscal hawks is Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.), a perennial thorn in Johnson’s side who spent last spring threatening to trigger a motion to vacate the speaker over frustrations with congressional negotiations surrounding a costly foreign aid bill. The libertarian-leaning Kentuckian continues to signal opposition to Johnson’s reelection bid despite Trump’s endorsement.

“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote Monday evening on X. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.”

Democrats are expected to uniformly oppose Johnson in a speaker floor vote and throw their support behind Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries instead, leaving the Louisianan little room for error within his own GOP conference. And Representative Andy Harris (R., Md.), chairman of the hardline Freedom Caucus, told Fox News last Thursday that his GOP colleagues “need to consider, if we’re going to advance Trump’s agenda, whether the current leadership is what we need.”

It’s possible a handful of recalcitrant members could join Massie in opposing Johnson in Friday’s floor vote, even if only on the first ballot. This strategy could force the speaker to come to the negotiating table and agree to a list of spending cuts or other demands before he wins a second term, though this strategy could also spell his undoing as it did former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s.

No matter this year’s speaker, this year’s to-do list is long. And delivering on Trump’s agenda will require lawmakers to avoid letting perfect be the enemy of the good, lawmakers tell National Review.

“Everybody is going to have to vote for things that they don’t necessarily love or might previously have been firmly against because there’s going to have to be compromise and negotiation to get across the finish line on major pieces of legislation,” Representative Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) told NR in a recent interview.

Last month, fissures emerged between congressional GOP leaders over which components of Trump’s 2024 campaign agenda lawmakers ought to prioritize in the new year. It’s likely congressional leaders will trudge forward with a plan hatched by newly elected Senate GOP leader John Thune: one legislative package focused on energy, defense, and immigration, and a second focused solely on extending the 2017 tax cuts. This two-step route would require passing two packages through the budget reconciliation process, which circumvents the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster and allows lawmakers to pass legislation through a simple majority vote.

Thune, who will have a 53-seat Senate GOP majority to work with this year, argues that this strategy could deliver Trump a major legislative win in the first few weeks of his second term while leaving the more complex tax fight until later in the year. “I think that big tax piece is just going to take a while,” the South Dakotan said on The Hugh Hewitt Show last month.

But his strategy has drawn criticism from the likes of House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith, who believes that tax-related legislation should come first given many provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire at the end of 2025. Smith and his allies in Congress worry that extending the 2017 tax cuts could prove difficult if budget hawks stand in the way, and that prioritizing tax-related legislation first or lumping this agenda item into a larger package is the better way to go.

Before lawmakers went home for the holidays, Smith expressed concern that passing two reconciliation bills in a single year will be too big a lift for the GOP. “To come up with idea that we will do a small reconciliation at the beginning that does energy and immigration and defense, and a second will be tax, is very foolish,” Smith said at a CNBC economic summit early last month. “It breeds failure, in my opinion.”

Either way, next year’s congressional GOP tax writers are already bracing for pushback from budget hawks who may hesitate before getting onboard with tax cut extensions unless legislation is paired with massive federal spending cuts. Lawmakers are expected to weave in tax-related policy recommendations proposed by Trump on the 2024 campaign trail as well.

After an ugly government funding fight, congressional lawmakers are bracing for an eventful year. And even rank-and-file Republican members of Congress who typically vote the party line signal there should be consequences for any GOP lawmakers who stand in the way of the White House’s legislative agenda.

“On November 5, the American people spoke, and they led to Trump overwhelming with the mandate,” says Representative Mike Collins (R., Ga.). “Now, when our coach calls the play and you don’t want to run the play? We change players at halftime.”

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Source: House Republicans in 2025: Ambitious Agenda, Slim Majority | National Review