House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is promising to pursue “transformational,” wide-ranging legislation if former President Donald Trump takes back the White House and Republicans control Congress — a lofty but possible aspiration as Democrats fight to defend their Senate majority and keep President Joe Biden in power.
Johnson said in an interview with Semafor on Wednesday that he is in frequent communication with the former president and has hinted at “legacy-defining” legislation early on in a second Trump presidency if he wins in November.
“I told him that I believe he can be the most consequential president of the modern era if we are focused on a policy and agenda-driven administration and Congress, and that’s our intention,” Johnson said.
The speaker said he has spoken with GOP members about embarking on a “whole of government” approach if Republicans can maintain their razor-thin majority in the House and flip the Senate in 2024. Johnson said up to nine committee chairs are preparing “transformational” wish lists early on, with the speaker promising that “there’ll be a lot of development of those policies in the coming weeks.”
Johnson said the goal is to produce a budget that can bypass the Senate filibuster and enact other bills that can pass strictly across party lines — a feat Johnson has been unable to do for several pieces of legislation this Congress due to pushback from hard-liners in the Republican conference.
Gaining the Republican majority was something Johnson promised to commit to when he assumed the speakership following the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year.
However, many hard-liners, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and members of the House Freedom Caucus, have spent much of 2024 blasting Johnson for pushing bills such as Ukraine aid, the spending deal, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal across the finish line with a large number of Democratic votes.
Johnson plans to apply lessons he’s learned since the first Trump administration, paired with his own experiences in Congress this year, to focus on measures at a “larger scope.”
“We don’t want to make the mistake we made in the past,” Johnson told Semafor. “Back in the 2017 time frame and in previous years, we Republicans kind of took a single-subject approach to reconciliation. We did one round of healthcare reform and one round of tax reform. But we’re looking at for [fiscal 2025], we want to have a much larger scope, multiple issues to address in addition to the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”
What exactly will be in the “transformational” legislation remains to be seen. However, any one of the proposed bills would likely address tax cuts passed under Trump that sunset in 2025, a renewal process that is estimated to cost trillions, according to the outlet. Other measures would likely address energy production and border security, the latter of which has been a flashpoint for House Republicans under the Biden administration.
Johnson is already taking steps to advance Trump’s agenda in the House. In the middle of a motion-to-vacate threat from Greene, Johnson traveled to Mar-a-Lago to hold a press conference with Trump to discuss election security and integrity.
The same day that he survived a motion to vacate by the House voting to table it, Johnson and other GOP lawmakers unveiled the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
It would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require people to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote. Though there are already federal laws in place that require citizens to swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens and they must provide proof of identity, some Republicans have argued that the laws do not go far enough.
As for other pieces of legislation in mind, Johnson did not go so far as to say whether any would roll back Democratic policies. The speaker did not commit to fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate and tax bill passed under Biden that drew much scrutiny from GOP lawmakers, saying that the “details are being determined” on the Republicans’ approach.
Obamacare, a bill Trump has long coveted to repeal since failing to do so in 2017, may not be touched right away, too.
“I don’t think there’s any coordinated effort on that yet,” Johnson said, adding that there’s “a lot of innovation and change that is desperately needed” in the healthcare system.
Biden’s White House is already criticizing any Republican efforts to “fast-track” tax breaks before they shore up in 2025, arguing it is part of a “MAGAnomics economic agenda that would trigger an ‘inflation bomb’ and raise costs for middle-class families.”
“President Biden believes the last thing our economy needs is an ‘inflation bomb’ — instead, he’s fighting to make the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share to reduce the deficit, and to cut taxes for middle-class families,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a memo on Thursday.
“And even though America has fought off the global inflation that rose after the pandemic better than any major economy, big corporations are using it as an excuse to take advantage of people and charge artificially high prices,” Bates added. “President Biden won’t stand for that, or for tax giveaways to those same companies.”
Hovering over Johnson’s plans for a wide-ranging agenda is the strict rule of reconciliation, which requires that legislation be focused primarily on spending and tax policies. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that Democrats could not use reconciliation to pass immigration reform, for instance.
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Despite this, Johnson said he is “optimistic” that GOP plans will prevail, including the Secure the Border Act. He said Republicans would not “present novel and untested theories to the parliamentarian in the final hours” and that they are working on their proposals on the “front end” to make sure they meet criteria.
“A lot of this has to do with communication and coordination, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way on both of those things,” Johnson said. “When you have a historically small majority as we do right now, those are really necessary components to building consensus. And we’ve already begun that process.”