During their first few days in power, the Republican-controlled House and Senate vowed to put aside their furious intraparty battles to make Donald J. Trump’s sweeping agenda the law of the land.Catie Edmonson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times, discusses how likely that actually is.Guest: Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York TimesBackground reading: Vice President Kamala D. Harris presided over the certification of her own loss without disputing it, and Democrats made no move to challenge the results.Speaker Mike Johnson narrowly avoided a painful and prolonged fight to keep his post, but his messy victory showed how difficult his job will be.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What happened during the electoral vote certification ceremony?
Well, I think today's ceremony really underscored what is supposed to be the pro forma nature of the January 6th congressional counting of electoral votes. This is a performative ritual in which Congress counts the electoral votes from each state and certifies the election of whoever won the presidency.
Obviously, if your first introduction to this ceremony was four years ago, you had a very different view of what happened on that day. Indeed. And so today's counting of electoral votes really was what was supposed to happen.
The House come to order. The Senate and House of Representatives are meeting in joint session to verify the certificates and count the votes of the electors of the several states for President and Vice President of the United States.
You had Vice President Kamala Harris overseeing the entire ceremony, overseeing essentially Congress certifying her own loss.
Chapter 2: How did Kamala Harris oversee her own electoral loss?
The certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Maryland seems to be regular in form and authentic. And it appears they're from the Kamala D. Harris of the state of California, received 10 votes for president, and Tim Walz of the state of Minnesota received 10 votes for vice president.
And you had a pretty stark scene, I think, in which she's standing there sort of staring straight ahead as one by one lawmakers stand up and they are announcing the states that she won as a presidential candidate, but they're also announcing the states that she lost.
Certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Michigan.
The certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Nevada.
The certificate of the electoral vote of the great state of Wisconsin seems to be regular in form and authentic. And it appears therefrom that Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida received 10 votes for president and J.D. Vance of the state of Ohio received 10 votes for vice president.
And so as we go through the roll call of states, not only are we reliving sort of the calls on election night, but Harris is reliving it too.
The votes for president of the United States are as follows. Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes. Kamala D. Harris of the state of California has received 226 votes.
And at the end of this entire process, it falls to her to be the one to say that Trump was the candidate who won the electoral votes to win the presidency. Thank you very much.
Right. It's all very respectful and it's the peaceful transfer of power in action. To your point earlier, a restoration of what is supposed to be a routine.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Mike Johnson face as Speaker of the House?
For all the fiscal reasons we've been discussing.
Exactly. And so that meant that he could not afford to lose anyone else on the House floor during that vote. And we got our first sort of inkling that there was going to be real trouble for him on this first ballot early on.
The next order of business is the election of the Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress. The reading clerk will now call the roll.
Adams. There are a number of Freedom Caucus members whose last names start with B or C, which is relevant only insofar as the roll call is called alphabetically.
Right.
And so lo and behold, Biggs of Arizona. We get to Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. His name is called out. And he doesn't respond.
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Chapter 4: Why are House Republicans divided over government spending?
Hmm. Silence. Silence.
Silence. And Michael, I have to say, sometimes lawmakers are not necessarily the most focused on the floor. Sometimes they're hard of hearing. And so the first time his name is called and there's silence, you're thinking maybe there's a mistake, maybe he's running late. But we saw him standing on the center aisle of the House floor.
Biggs of Arizona.
His name was called again. And he was staring just sort of defiantly straight into space.
Mm-hmm.
And they moved on. And we saw that happen several more times throughout the roll call. Clyde. And it became extraordinarily clear, especially given which lawmakers were refusing to answer, that this was a concerted effort to deprive Johnson of the votes he needed to become speaker and basically to put a stick in his eye.
And his predicament gets worse as we go down the roll call, because not only has Thomas Massey voted against him, voted for another Republican lawmaker, but... Self. Donalds. Two other Republicans cast their votes for other lawmakers as well. So now you had six lawmakers refusing to answer in protest and three Republicans voting against him outright.
Johnson this whole time was sitting very stoically in his seat on the House floor. But before they even, I think, got to the last set of names on the roll call, he was out of his seat and he was over talking to some of these defectors.
And that set off a very familiar scene on the House floor, which was the Republican leader haggling and negotiating in real time with these holdouts for their votes to win the gavel.
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Chapter 5: How did Trump influence the Speaker election?
One of them is that they can't raise the debt limit, which is something that President Trump has requested lawmakers do without enacting deep spending cuts that would offset their increases to the nation's borrowing limit. Another one is that if you're going to implement a program as costly as mass deportations, then you need to cut other government programs somewhere else.
And so what you have essentially is these lawmakers saying that they want to enact Trump's agenda, but they want to do so in a way that is going to be almost impossible to push through the House when it comes to achieving these types of fiscal goals. And so I think that's partly why they're looking to Mike Johnson. Congress, of course, has the power of the purse.
I think they're looking for him to come up with some of those answers to fill in some of the blanks here. But I also think it's just a fact that they inherently understand that Trump himself doesn't really have these same concerns about fiscal responsibility that they themselves share.
So ultimately, they take out their frustration at Mike Johnson, at the speaker, because he's ultimately responsible for federal spending. So it makes a certain sense.
I think that's right. And look, I think more cynically, you also just have to face the reality that he is a politically safer target to vent frustrations at than Trump is.
So what does all of this add up to when we think about how Republican control of the House is going to work with Donald Trump as president and Mike Johnson as speaker?
Well, I think the entire exercise that we went through on Friday was really conservatives putting Mike Johnson and his leadership on notice, right? The idea that he really is going to have to answer to them. He is going to have to be responsive to their demands. And I think, look, you could say, hasn't that been true for the entire last year of Mike Johnson's speakership?
How is this any different? But the difference here, I think, are the expectations. Republicans are starting this year thinking we have a real opportunity here. We just won big. We won the House. We won the Senate. We won the White House. This is our time to deliver for our voters, for our constituents. And so there's a lot of pressure on Mike Johnson to deliver.
Or else, right? I mean, that's the fundamental message here. If he doesn't deliver for especially these conservative fiscal house Republicans, they may decide one day to wake up and toss him out.
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Chapter 6: What demands did the House Freedom Caucus make?
Right.
And this is where Senator Rick Scott of Florida threw his hat in the ring to challenge John Thune to lead the Senate Republican conference.
And we should think of Rick Scott as being that MAGA-style candidate.
That's right. Now, one incredibly important difference between how the House elects the speaker and how senators elect their party leader is that the Senate does it by secret ballot. And by the time the first round of ballots were cast, it was clear that Rick Scott was not going to have the votes to lead the Republican conference at all.
Worth pointing out, as I think you're essentially doing, that the secret ballot means that a senator never really has to tell anybody, including potentially angry MAGA-supporting constituents, what they did in that vote.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. It gives them this insulation of plausible deniability that members over in the House certainly do not have. And I think that helped Thune get over the finish line here. But I think a lot of these Republican senators saw Thune as an institutionalist. He actually served as McConnell's deputy. He was McConnell's number two.
He absorbed a lot of the responsibilities that McConnell kind of had to relinquish as he was dealing with health problems in the last year. And I think they also saw him as someone who wanted to guard the Senate's independence as an institution in a way that Rick Scott was certainly not campaigning on.
Well, just to explain that, how should we think of Thune and what is his relationship to Donald Trump? You've made it clear that he was not the MAGA candidate. What is he exactly?
Well, you know, I think it might be best explained in his own words. Senate Majority Leader Soon, welcome back to Meet the Press.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of fiscal responsibility for the Republican agenda?
Which I think kind of tells you all you need to know.
Where has it evolved from and what is it evolving into?
Well, Trump himself actually once accused John Thune of being a rhino, a Republican in name only, which is one of sort of the worst political slurs that can be bandied about within the Republican Party.
And what earned him that moniker, that slur, rhino, from Trump?
Well, that is because John Thune not only did not support Trump's effort to challenge the 2020 election results, but he also was quite publicly skeptical of that effort to overturn Biden's electoral victory.
I actually remember very distinctly a reporter asking Thune in the halls of the Capitol leading up to January 6th, 2021, asking him, John Thune, what do you think about Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election here? And Thune's answer was, I think it's going to go down like a shot dog, which Trump did not take kindly to. But four years later.
I think when it comes to the big issues, securing the border, rebuilding the military, strengthening the economy, generating energy dominance for this country, those are all things on which we agree.
Thune himself explicitly says a number of the major agenda items that Trump has coming into the White House are ones that he believes in.
The things that he talked about on the campaign trail, the things that the American people voted for, are all things that I think this president wants to get done, we want to get done, and I say that our incentives are aligned.
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