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While the race to lead the House of Representatives is over, Speaker Mike Johnson’s dangerous political year is just beginning.
Winning the speaker’s gavel was no easy task considering Johnson, R-La., had no Democratic support and was only able to lose one fellow Republican, thanks to the House GOP majority.
All House Republicans except Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted for Johnson late Friday. Two Republican lawmakers who had initially voted for someone other than Johnson, Reps. Keith Self, R-Texas, and Ralph Norman, RSC, were eventually persuaded to change their votes after speaking with Johnson and President-elect Trump.
Johnson will have to navigate an equally tight margin in the coming months as he helps carry out what President-elect Donald Trump promised would be a very active first 100 days of his new administration.
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson appears outside the US Capitol. (Getty Images/AP)
“There are a lot of expectations and potential pitfalls,” Marc Short, who served as director of legislative affairs during the first Trump administration, told Fox News Digital in an interview late last month.
The first half of 2025 alone is expected to see at least three separate tax fights.
Johnson, meanwhile, is poised to lose two House Republicans: Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida. Both members join the Trump administration later this month.
It will reduce their Republican majority in the House to just 217 seats, compared to Democrats’ 215, meaning Republicans will have to vote on a tie-breaking basis to pass any bill on a party-line vote.
Special elections to replace Waltz and retiring Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, are scheduled for April. The election to replace Stefanik has not yet been set.
Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to pass two massive conservative policy and spending overhauls through a process called “reconciliation” which lowers the threshold for approval in the Senate from 60 votes to a simple majority for certain budget matters.
Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to use reconciliation to pass significant tax policy changes that the other party typically opposes, meaning they require extraordinary levels of intrapartisan cooperation in both the House and Senate.
Pictured are President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for his next National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz (left), and the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik (right).
“There are high expectations about budget reconciliation, and that’s very difficult, even when you have wide margins. To think that you’re going to do it twice a year with those margins, I think is an enormously high expectation that seems to be unreasonable ” Short told Fox News Digital.
“And add another funding bill in three months, plus a fight over the debt ceiling.”
Along with the reconciliation bills, which are unlikely to receive much, if any, Democratic support, Republicans will also have to contend with the government funding deadline. Just signed up on March 14th.
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House and Senate lawmakers approved a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2024 government funding levels in December to give negotiators more time to hammer out the remainder of FY 2025.
Congress risks plunging the government into a partial shutdown if the House and Senate do not pass another funding extension or set new priorities for the remainder of fiscal year 2025.
The next government funding deadline will be at the end of the fiscal year on September 30.
That’s not all Johnson will have to focus on during these months, however.
President-elect Donald Trump looks on during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center on December 22, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
A bipartisan agreement In 2023, he suspended the US debt limit until January 2025, after which the Treasury Department will be forced to take “extraordinary measures” to prevent a national credit default.
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The debt limit refers to how much debt the US government can accumulate while making the expenditures it has already committed to. From Christmas Eve, the national debt — which measures what the US owes its creditors — fell to $36,161,621,015,445.57, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.
Raising the debt limit is also traditionally a bitter political battle, with Republicans and Democrats looking for any possible leverage to attach their own policy goals to the negotiations.
A recent model produced by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) projects that the Treasury’s “extraordinary measures” will take the US until mid-June or earlier, giving Congress six months to act.
