The Daily - Republicans Take Control of Congress — and Harris Certifies Her Own Loss

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

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.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today. During its first few days in power, the Republican-controlled House and Senate have vowed to put aside their furious intra-party battles to make Donald Trump's sweeping agenda the law of the land. I spoke with my colleague Katie Edmondson about how likely that actually is. It's Tuesday, January 7th. So Katie, take us, if you would, inside the House chamber on Monday afternoon for this

pretty momentous 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 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. The certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Maryland seems to be regular and 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. The 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, informed, and authentic. And it appears there from that Donald J. Trump

of the state of Florida received 10 votes for president, and JD 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 inaction, to your point

earlier, a restoration of what is supposed to be a routine. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think lawmakers were largely pretty relieved to see that they were able to all come together here, complete their ceremony without any major events. But I also think at the same time, you'd be kidding yourself if you pointed to this particular vote and said, well, Congress is going to be a pretty drama-free institution, a pretty united institution moving forward, when in fact you only have to look back to the vote

that played out on the House floor on Friday with the re-election of Mike Johnson to the speakership to see if there are some pretty raw divisions within the House Republican Conference that are likely going to animate this Congress moving forward. Well, talk us through that. What exactly happened last Friday? Well, really, Michael, this is the continuation of the story that you and I have talked about for so long now, which is that there is this group of ultra-conservative, anti-spending fiscal hawks

in the House Republican Conference who feel that they have been again and again, let down by House Republican leadership when it comes to matters of government spending. These are the guys who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy when he was speaker. And this time, when it came to the reelection of Speaker Mike Johnson,

they decided to play the role of the thorn in his side yet again. And why exactly did they choose to fight this speaker's re-election? Given, and Katie, I think it was you who said this to me in one of those many conversations about this group of hard-right fiscal conservatives, Johnson was for a long time considered a kind of kindred spirit to these House conservative Republicans and someone whose strong relationship with them would insulate him from this kind of rebellion. So on paper, it should have been a glide path for Johnson.

But these ultra conservatives for months now have been nursing the same grievance against Johnson that they had against McCarthy, which is that when it comes to keeping the government open, avoiding a shutdown, passing these massive spending bills, both Johnson and McCarthy routinely relied on Democratic votes to keep spending levels flat. And it is something that has just infuriated these hard right Republicans. That is something that has just infuriated these hard-right Republicans. The other factor that was working against Johnson here is that he had an extraordinarily thin margin in the House. So in order to win the speakership on Friday, he was able to lose just one Republican.

And we knew going into the vote that in fact he already had lost at least one Republican. We knew that Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky was going to vote against him. Mm-hmm. 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. And so lo and behold, we get to Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. His name is called out. And he doesn't respond. 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. Biggs of South Carolina. Johnson. And they moved on. Cloud. Cloud. Cloud. And we saw that happen several more times throughout the roll call. Clyde.

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 you go down the roll call, because not only has Thomas Massey voted against him, voted for another Republican lawmaker, but Norman, Jordan, 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. Right, because at this moment, he has lost re-election, or he's not won it. Well, it looks like he's going to lose re-election, and not only that, if the vote had been called

with those lawmakers casting their votes or refusing to vote, it looked as if the gavel could fall into Hakeem Jeffrey's hands, the Democratic leader, because the person who wins the speakership is the person who wins the most votes. So this was going to be a huge problem for not only Mike Johnson personally, but potentially Republicans at large. So Mike Johnson is negotiating. He's talking with these lawmakers. And we see those six lawmakers who refused to vote suddenly change their votes and cast them for Johnson.

Okay. So where does that math leave Mike Johnson? Well, he still has a big problem on his hands because again, he can only lose one Republican and at this point in time, there are three Republicans voting against him. Now, his allies always saw Thomas Massey, the congressman from Kentucky, as being a movable, someone they were not going to be able to flip. And so Johnson's focus turns to the two other holdouts, Keith Self of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. And he'd been talking with them on the house floor, but he kind of whisks them off the

house floor into this ante room. And that's when Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina intervenes and who does she have on the phone but President Trump. He apparently was in the middle of a golf game down in Florida and he spoke with Johnson, Norman and Self all on speakerphone in this ante room. And we know what his message was because Ralph Norman and Keith Self told us afterwards. His message was, look, Mike is the only guy who has the votes to become speaker. Right? You need to do this for me.

We need to get on with it. Right? We have a trifecta. This type of opportunity is a rare one. We need to seize it. We need to get going. And it sounds like neither man really pushed back much on this. Ralph Norman told us that his response to Trump was, well, you know, we just

want to make sure that Mike is the person who's going to get everything that you want. We want to make sure you get your deal. And that's really where our trepidations are. But House will be in order. By the end of the call, Keith Self and Ralph Norman walk back out onto the House floor. Mr. Norman Johnson, Mr. Self Johnson. Johnson. Mr. Self. Johnson. And they changed their votes. Therefore, the Honorable Mike Johnson of the state of Louisiana, having received a majority of the votes cast, is duly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress.

And so Johnson was able to successfully win the speakership on that first ballot. But minutes after Johnson is officially re-elected, the House Freedom Caucus, which is sort of the organizing organ for a lot of these guys, it's that ultra conservative block of lawmakers, they send him a public letter. And it begins, today we voted for Mike Johnson for speaker of the house because of our steadfast support of President Trump. We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the speaker's track record over the past 15 months. Translation, we voted for you, but we don't really trust you. And we did it for Trump. Yeah, exactly. And to send this minutes after he wins re-election, after they subjected him to this kind of embarrassing spectacle

on the House floor, right, is really to assert their own power and to say, you need to listen to us. Katie, how do you understand what played out here? These House Republicans basically saying, they're going to do this for Trump. When Trump himself is somebody who has, when he was president, raised the national debt by trillions and trillions of dollars, which very much seems at odds with what these House fiscal conservatives say they care about. It almost feels like they're holding a lot of what's happened

in the last few years against Johnson rather than Trump, when on top of all that, Trump is pledging to do things as president that would further increase the national debt. Yeah. I mean, I think we got a preview of a lot of potential collisions to come in this Congress, both in this vote and in the past couple of weeks, right? In this letter that the House Freedom Caucus sent to Johnson, they enumerated a list of demands. And these demands are going to be incredibly hard

for Johnson to act on. 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 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.

Yes, that is the message that is the sort of Damocles they want hovering over his head. They want him to know that he is on thin ice. And I think what's striking about that is it's shaping up to be a very different environment than what we're seeing over on the other side of the Capitol, where Republicans also have a majority in the United States Senate. We'll be right back. So Katie, describe the dynamic now at play over in the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol under Republican control. Well, while all of this drama was playing out in the House on Friday, things were much

calmer over in the Senate. We saw the newly elected senators get sworn in. But probably the biggest change was that Mitch McConnell is no longer the Republican leader. And that's for the first time in about two decades. Instead, we have a new leader helming the Republican conference, and that is Senator John Thune of South Dakota. And what's the story of his selection, his rather undramatic selection compared to Mike Johnson's as Senate Majority Leader? Well, it was an election that was lacking in drama, but that wasn't necessarily a foregone

conclusion. So back in November, when it became clear that Republicans had won control of the Senate, there was, I would say, a clutch of MAGA conservatives who said, look, if we're going to have this governing trifecta, why don't we make sure that we have a true MAGA loyalist leading Senate Republicans? Because they felt that they had been somewhat smothered by the leadership of Mitch McConnell, who did much to enable Trump, but also was quite critical of him at times. 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. Thanks, Kristen. Great to be with you.

He actually went on to a Sunday show a couple of days ago and was asked, How would you describe your relationship with the President-elect Trump right now? What's your relationship like with Donald Trump? And his response was, Well, you know what? We are... it's, it's, it's evolving. It's evolving. 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. And so I think... 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. That his incentives and Trump's incentives are aligned. At the same time, he is certainly not a MAGA loyalist in the vein of Rick Scott. And I do think one of the reasons why Republican senators ultimately voted to have him lead their conference was because they are looking for a leader who is willing to assert a little

bit more independence. And they thought he would provide some sort of level of protection for the Senate as an institution at a time when Trump has strongly suggested he wants to co-opt that independence for his own agenda. Right. I guess the question is just how much or just how little? That's right. That is going to be the question of this Congress. So Katie, let's bring all of this together now as we consider how this Congress is likely to operate over the next few weeks, next few months, next basically two years until there's a midterm election and things might change. What underlies the drama in the House, as you explained, is the fact that they have a very small razor thin majority that allows

these fiscal conservatives to exert a lot of power when they want to. They can simply withhold their support for either Johnson or any Republican bill. The reality is that the same situation basically holds true in the Senate, right? There are just a few Senate Republicans who could block anything, whether it's a confirmation or a spending bill or an immigration bill. So is this a Republican controlled House and Senate that's actually practically capable of getting Trump's agenda passed? I mean, it's going to be really tough. Now we have a blueprint of what they hope their major legislative accomplishment is going to be.

What's that? So Republicans right now are talking about shoehorning in a number of their priorities, raising the debt limit, enacting deep spending cuts, extending the Trump tax cuts from 2017, as well as cracking down on immigration, implementing these new border security policies, and they want to put it all into one bill that they're going to try to fast track through Congress using this process called budget reconciliation, which allows the Senate to pass a measure like this

using just a simple majority vote. Right, Democrats did this with the Inflation Reduction Act. That's right, and the point of that is that it's a much lower threshold of support needed to pass this than what is usually required in the Senate. Now, the problem with this is that by jamming all of this legislation into one bill, maybe even jamming it into two bills, as some have suggested, is that this essentially becomes sort of a seesaw from hell.

What does that mean? Well, you have lawmakers who want to include very expensive immigration measures, who want to extend the Trump tax cuts, which are estimated to cost about $4 trillion. And at the same time, they want to make sure this bill doesn't cost money or add to the nation's debt. And so that means in order to offset the costs of all of those

other policies, you're going to have to enact some really deep spending cuts. Now there are certainly a number of lawmakers who would be happy to shutter entire agencies. These are the Republicans in the House that we've mostly been talking about today. But at the same time, both in the House and the Senate, you have more centrist Republicans, particularly Republicans who represent purplish districts, states who just got out of tough reelections, who certainly don't want to be seen as laying waste to the federal government, shuddering programs that their constituents rely on. And so this becomes a tremendously difficult balancing act to figure out how do you implement

all these policies that are going to cost a lot of money while cutting a bunch of programs, each of which have their own constituencies on the Hill. And House Republican leaders have decided to add an extra layer of difficulty here. They've said they want to make sure this legislation at least passes the House within the first 100 days of Trump's presidency. Wow. And that is a Herculean lift that we're now talking about. Right.

Getting a bill of this scale and this many different goals and competing interests passed in essentially three months. With a one vote majority in the House, yes. It feels, Katie, that we should end where we began with the certification of the election. And the reality that four years ago, we couldn't have had this kind of conversation. In fact, we didn't have this conversation because the Capitol had just been overrun by rioters who believed Donald Trump's false claim that the election had been stolen. And it was chaos. and it was trauma. And now four years later, his victory to a second presidential

term has been very peacefully certified, as you recounted, in a way that does give us the space to talk about his agenda and what his relationship with Congress will look like. And it's very ironic that he's now been on both ends of this day. Well, I remember in the days after January 6th talking to Republican members of Congress who themselves were sheltering in place at the Capitol on January 6th who heard stories from their staff about their staff barricading themselves into their office to protect themselves from the rioters who were rampaging through the Capitol. And I remember a lot of them being appalled by what happened, who were making the case

that Donald Trump was not someone who should lead the Republican Party. And that in fact in order to move on from January 6, in order to move on from what had happened, that Republicans needed to walk away from him as a leader. Now fast forward four years later, voters have spoken. They re-elected Trump to the White House for a second term. They elected a Republican Congress, giving Republicans a majority in both the House and the Senate. And you have a Republican party that is pretty unified around Trump himself.

And so it's a remarkable turnabout. And it's not lost on me at all that the question now is not, should they unify around Trump, but rather how unified can they be and how successful they will be at making his agenda come to fruition. Well, Katie, thank you very much. Thanks Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

said that he would resign after almost a decade in power. His resignation follows months of calls by members of his own party that he step aside as both prime minister and leader of his party before major elections later this year. And a legal battle is brewing over the future of U.S. steel.

On Monday, three days after President Biden blocked the merger of Japan's Nippon steel with U.S. steel, both companies have sued to keep the $14 billion merger on track. In blocking the merger, Biden said that it risked U.S. national security, a claim that both companies have rejected. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tenesketter, Asita Chattervedi, and Rochelle Banja. It was edited by Rachel Cuester and Liz O'Balin, contains original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Mary Lozano, and Alicia Baetube, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Van Liensevierck of Wonderland. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.