Republican leaders are scrambling to regain control of the House after GOP hard-liners effectively shut down the floor Wednesday over their demands that the Senate pass a stalled elections overhaul bill.
Speaker Mike Johnson is set to meet with President Donald Trump Thursday morning in an effort to try and find a way out of the mess, according to four people granted anonymity to describe the private plans.
Johnson is planning to keep the House in session Thursday and have members vote on at least one bipartisan bill that has already been teed up for the floor as he tries to convince the president to help end the hard-liners’ blockade.
GOP leaders hoped to put several additional bills up for a vote this week, including a pair of fiscal 2027 spending measures. But the group of MAGA loyalists, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, is insisting no legislation can pass until the SAVE America Act clears the Senate.
If Johnson can’t enlist Trump to break the impasse, the House will leave for the week, the four people said.
A breakthrough won’t be easy. The president is just as animated about the SAVE America Act as the hard-liners holding up the House floor. He abruptly canceled a planned bill-signing for landmark bipartisan housing legislation Wednesday morning, just hours before it was scheduled to take place in the Capitol with Johnson and other GOP leaders, citing the need to prioritize the elections bill.
Johnson is expected to pitch Trump on a plan to enact a watered-down version of the SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirement by including a grant program to encourage adoption of voter ID laws in a long-shot plan to pass a new party-line policy bill this year.
But that is only a fraction of what Trump wants the Republican Congress to get done this year, and the GOP hard-liners are already panning Johnson’s plan as insufficient.
“There’s no compromise,” Trump told reporters Wednesday, saying he would insist on the full suite of policies he has long demanded.
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