Ever since November, when Republicans swept both chambers of Congress and the White House, GOP lawmakers have been bullish about making the most of what they see as a clear mandate to reinvent Washington.
But as Republicans try to shake off a close call with a government shutdown and prepare for Donald Trump’s first 100 days, lawmakers are starting to grapple with a simple reality: They may not be able to do much of anything.
“They can’t even extend government funding,” a frustrated Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS in December, as the House GOP nearly imploded over a stopgap spending bill.
“They’re going to do this all over again in March. There’s a debt ceiling fight coming up,” he said. “Good luck.”
Before Trump even takes office on Jan. 20, House Republicans must elect a speaker — a delicate, historically difficult task given the mutiny currently on Mike Johnson’s hands. Republicans then had to agree to a rules package, which was released on Wednesday. Those rules are rife with potential trip wires, like the nine members required to hold a vote to oust a speaker, and are already under negotiation as Johnson tries to secure the votes he needs for the speakership.
These two items — electing a speaker and adopting a rules package — are supposed to be the easy part. They are more often perfunctory votes than hurdles for a new majority to clear. But in this Congress, the first day is just where the problems start.
In Trump’s first 100 days, the Senate will attempt to confirm his cabinet — including controversial picks like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Then, leadership in both chambers intends to take up a sweeping package that addresses border security, energy production and defense via a complicated reconciliation process that lowers the Senate vote threshold to circumvent the filibuster. Or maybe Republicans plan to first do a tax bill through reconciliation. Or maybe they plan to do just one reconciliation bill for the whole lot. There hasn’t been clarity on the plan, but there’s already a lot of debate.
Either way, some of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for individual rates and small businesses expire at the end of 2025. Republicans will have to act if they want to extend those rates, and many GOP lawmakers think of the tax bill as their lone opportunity to enact other tax policy changes.
Throughout those early days, Republicans and Democrats will also be negotiating a larger spending package to carry the government through the rest of the fiscal year, until October.
Government funding runs out on March 15, and Republicans have not passed a government spending bill without Democratic support since 2017. But there are already signs that Trump and Republicans plan to push for partisan policies, like a border wall and reduced domestic spending, that could lead to a shutdown in the president’s first 100 days.
Republicans offered a glimpse of their partisan priorities in their rules package, which lays the foundation for a floor vote on 12 much anticipated, conservative bills. Those bills would define sex as solely based on “reproductive biology” for Title IX purposes, impose stricter criminal penalties on migrants who illegally cross the border, restrict federal funding to sanctuary cities and prohibit a moratorium on fracking. Among the other measures are bills to mandate medical care for fetuses that survive abortion, sanctions for the International Criminal Court after the ICC was critical of Israel and proof of citizenship voter requirements.
Of course, all of this is just the beginning. At some point this summer, Congress must also raise the debt ceiling. Due to a “handshake agreement” brokered between Johnson, Trump and House conservatives, the plan is to pair a $1.5 trillion debt ceiling increase with $2.5 trillion in mandatory spending cuts that target programs like Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits.
Such a feat, which would almost certainly have to be passed by Republicans alone, is unlikely to happen, but the discussions could be politically damaging.
Plus, after extending the farm bill for one year, Republicans still have to deal with a rewrite of that legislation before the end of the year.
If this all sounds difficult to accomplish with a bare-bones majority, that’s because it is.
But, for the moment, even after a disastrous government funding fiasco that ended with a slimmed-down bill and many angry Republicans, GOP lawmakers suggested all it would take is teamwork.
“As a team, we have to recognize the way we’ve done things in the past to get things through has not worked,” Rep. Burgess Owens told NOTUS in December. “Let’s focus on following our leader and work as a team. If we do that, it’s amazing the miracles that can happen.”
That’s a big “if.” What’s unsaid but well-known among the many Republican platitudes about unity is that collaborating and consensus-building don’t come easily to the House GOP.
There is a certain miracle-working required to get Republicans to play nice, especially with a razor-thin House majority where lawmakers are regularly plotting to knife their own speaker.
It’s true that, in the Senate, Republicans control 53 votes. That gives the upper chamber some wiggle room. But the Senate GOP will need near-total alignment to confirm certain Trump nominees and pass laws. That’s particularly tough with moderate Trump critics like Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Both have signaled they don’t plan to rubber-stamp the incoming president’s nominees or agenda.
Still, even if laws advance in Majority Leader John Thune’s Senate, they must fly in the House, where the margins are even narrower and the conference is more unruly.
Senators and Trump allies know that, even without a filibuster, the House is the toughest roadblock to the GOP’s agenda on Capitol Hill.
“The bigger challenge is in the House, where they have to get their act together,” Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS. “They’ve got to build their team, and they’ve got to understand that this should be a priority for all of us.”
Since Trump has created vacancies by tapping Reps. Elise Stefanik, Michael Waltz and Matt Gaetz — who already withdrew his attorney general bid — for his cabinet, House Republicans can hardly spare a vote to pass legislation without working with Democrats. When they assemble on Friday, the majority will be 219-215, with the majority shrinking to 217-215 in a matter of a few weeks.
At that point, Republicans won’t even be able to spare a single vote if every member shows up. Indeed, with fluctuations in attendance, there are likely to be days when Republicans don’t actually hold the majority.
None of this is exactly foreign to Republicans. Johnson spent his freshman year as speaker navigating a majority of a similar size, though he also had a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president that necessitated bipartisan negotiations. Johnson’s strategy for every major piece of legislation — including spending bills and a foreign aid package — was to lean on significant Democratic support since his own conference could rarely, if ever, find the unanimity required to act alone.
“The Republicans are fractured. They’re all over the map,” the incoming No. 1 Judiciary Committee Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, told NOTUS. “They can’t unite themselves, I mean, they, after all, are the majority, and they should be able to do it themselves.”
Democrats like Raskin have made clear that they have less appetite to play ball as Republicans pursue a hard-right agenda. Few Democrats, if any, intend to help Republicans as they try to follow Trump’s lead on mass deportation, tax cuts, spending cuts and America First agenda.
That means Republicans will largely be going alone, trying to pass sweeping changes — many of them through reconciliation — all on their own.
That accomplishing the feat is theoretically possible presents its own problems. The only thing standing in the way of Republicans passing much of their agenda through reconciliation is Republicans, which means that if it doesn’t happen, the GOP will only be able to blame itself.
But, as Raskin observed, House Republicans have floundered whenever they try to pass legislation alone. Johnson has been unable to get rules adopted with his own party in the Rules Committee or on the floor, meaning he has to pass bills through a process known as “suspension” that requires two-thirds approval.
The House Freedom Caucus and other hard-right Republicans have shown no qualms with openly defying the speaker — whether that speaker is Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan or John Boehner. And, more recently — as last month’s spending showdown made clear — even when Trump, Elon Musk and House leadership are pushing for an outcome, plenty of Republicans have no problem pushing back. Thirty-eight Republicans voted against the Trump-approved spending bill with a debt ceiling hike, forcing the GOP to compromise with Democrats instead.
But Republicans can’t even agree on comprising or not with Democrats. Some GOP lawmakers see any negotiation with Democrats as heresy, while others see it as necessary.
“That’s healthy for this country,” former Trump official Rep. Max Miller said of Republicans working with Democrats, “and people should be applauding that.”
And yet Democrats themselves are more hesitant than ever to work with Republicans, once again complicating the prospect of Congress accomplishing much of anything.
“It’s going to get real tough getting this stuff done,” one conservative lawmaker, Rep. Tom Tiffany, told NOTUS. “Our work is cut out for us.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.
Calen Razor and Helen Huiskes, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.