If Republicans keep the House, they’ll have a narrow majority again — historically a recipe for infighting and chaos.
This time, though, they hope Donald Trump will unite them.
“Everybody thinks it will be contentious,” Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told NOTUS of the upcoming session. “I don’t think it will, because President Trump is at the helm of the executive branch. We’ve got a good chance of doing some great things.”
“The president’s overwhelming mandate,” Burchett added, “sends a clear message that his agenda is pretty much our agenda.”
Trump definitely didn’t unite GOP lawmakers in his first term. If anything, his distracting tweets, frequent policy flip-flops and personal attacks on Republican members divided an unruly party even more. But most of Trump’s outspoken critics have left Congress (or have been voted out), and members have a more realistic legislative to-do list than they did in 2017.
Burchett, at least, is an unswerving ally to Trump. He thinks replacing income taxes with across-the-board tariffs would be a political winner, he wants to abolish the Department of Education and he hopes Trump really does bring Elon Musk into the administration as a czar of government efficiency. Many of those proposals would make some of his GOP colleagues recoil, but Burchett thinks they’ll have to suck it up.
“The public is enamored with President Trump,” said Burchett. And it’s going to be “really hard” for any Republicans who oppose his agenda to explain it to voters back home.
Trump will rely on plenty of executive orders and administrative actions to enact his plans. To pass legislation through Congress, much will depend on how narrow the potential GOP majority will be. Republicans have 211 seats thus far, with 25 races still uncalled. Party leaders expect to win enough of those districts to claim the majority, but they’re not sure they’ll have more than a handful of extra seats in the end. (Senate Republicans will likely have a 53-seat majority which means they’ll easily be able to approve judges and cabinet picks, but legislation that needs a 60-vote majority will be a tougher sell.)
The House speaker’s job won’t be easy. The speaker will have to keep members organized and balance competing priorities. It doesn’t even take personal animus to send a conference into a tailspin again — lawmakers can simply have different interest groups, vastly different districts and entirely opposing political incentives.
Some Republicans want to make current House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job more secure — that is, if he wins it again. Last Congress, any one member could bring forward a motion to oust the speaker, with a mechanism that forced a fast vote on the floor. It’s how a group of GOP rebels, including Burchett, got rid of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last October.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who opposed that ouster, told NOTUS in an interview in September that he will push for rules changes to make moves like that more difficult, positing the party could require a majority of the conference to bring forward such a motion. Fitzpatrick also wants to cut down on floor defections on procedural votes, which happened frequently in the 118th Congress.
“If you’re voting down a rule or you’re filing a privileged resolution — if that’s allowed to continue — then we’re dealing with a Wild West scenario in the chamber,” he told NOTUS. “It’s not good for our country.”
Burchett isn’t worried about it. “I’ll go with the will of the conference on that,” he said of changing the rules on how to remove the speaker.
“That’s not a beach I’m going to die on. I don’t have a lot of feelings one way or the other,” he said.
Others are likely to push back fiercely. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, has often criticized Johnson and even attempted to remove him from power earlier this year. She took issue with his decision to bring additional Ukraine aid for a vote and criticized deals he made with Democrats to avoid government shutdowns. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky has also aired similar complaints.
It’s not clear yet if Johnson will face a leadership challenge. But if the GOP majority is incredibly narrow, it may be difficult for him to win enough votes on the floor — prompting a possible repeat of the delayed start to the Congress in 2023, when McCarthy’s far-right opponents rejected him more than a dozen times before finally allowing him to take the position after winning assurances from him about how he would govern.
“It depends if you’re talking about a two-seat majority versus a seven-seat majority,” Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said of Johnson’s chances of keeping the gavel. “I know he’s had two frequent detractors. So I’d like to see us have more than a two-seat majority to get past those two.”
Bacon blamed just a couple of troublemakers for the dysfunction of the 118th Congress.
“Ninety-five percent have always gotten along,” he said of the GOP conference in an interview with NOTUS on Friday morning. “It’s always just a few outliers. If we only have a four- or five-seat majority, it doesn’t take many to create turbulence.”
That’s why even Bacon, one of the more moderate members of the conference from a district that Vice President Kamala Harris won, hopes Trump can keep the party focused.
“With President Trump now back in the White House, he’ll probably be more vocal about trying to stop some of the division,” said Bacon.
Trump has praised Johnson recently, even thanking him in his election night victory speech and said he was doing a “terrific job.” Johnson, who is officially running for speaker again, said in a letter announcing his bid that he’d work “hand-in-hand” with the Trump administration.
But Republicans who lived through Trump’s first term are also quick to point out that the GOP conference wasn’t particularly unified during Trump’s first months in office, as House Republicans fought over the details of an Obamacare repeal attempt.
The party is looking at “a fairly narrow majority, no matter what,” said Bacon. He thinks there’s enough consensus to extend tax cuts originally approved in 2017 and to pass border security measures. But the party might struggle beyond that.
“We had a 40-seat majority in 2017,” he said. “We had a hard time getting the health care bill done and the tax bill done, but we did.” Still, even after the House passed the Affordable Care Act repeal, it fell apart in the GOP-held Senate.
“Nothing’s ever easy,” he said.
And Bacon himself is already coming into the new Congress with a vastly different view on one key issue than Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, teeing up an early clash next year.
“It’s in our strategic interest that Ukraine remain independent, and I’m committed to them,” he said of passing more aid to the war-torn country.
Fitzpatrick, too, will fight for more assistance.
“There is no higher priority for me, from a foreign policy standpoint, than Ukraine beating Russia and getting their country back,” he told NOTUS. “I will die on this hill.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.