CONGRESS

Axios - President-elect Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plan to push for what could wind up as the biggest bill in American history — a mega-MAGA reordering of taxes, the nation's borders, federal spending and regulations, transition and Hill sources tell Axios' Mike Allen and Stef Kight. Washington will soon witness a furious, multitrillion-dollar legislative and lobbying fight that likely will dominate politics through late spring and possibly beyond.

At stake: Unprecedented spending to tighten borders and remove people here illegally, huge tax cuts, energy deregulation — plus, presumably, unprecedented spending cuts to help pay for it all. We're told the bill will include Trump's popular "no tax on tips" campaign promise. Raising the federal debt ceiling could be included.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates extending the tax cuts from Trump's first term could cost $5 trillion over 10 years. So look for a conservative push for significant spending offsets. Senate Republicans have already been busy finding ways to pay for parts of the plan via spending cuts + energy revenue.

Each piece is complicated and costly on its own. Rolling it all into one fat package is unlike anything Washington has done before. The margin for error is slim....

MSNBC - With the slimmest of GOP majorities, it certainly won’t be easy to govern. Republicans in the House have no problem with intraparty conflict. And when not trying to whip lawmaker votes, Johnson must contend with the whims of Trump. As we saw with the shutdown debacle last month, Trump and his advisers can be unpredictable, with that unpredictability manifesting in contradictory and at times wildly inefficient tangents.

Right now, the biggest obstacle to Trump’s agenda is the Freedom Caucus. Made up of some of the most extreme members of the House, this group has proven repeatedly that it is not all that interested in governing. Rather, lawmakers like Reps. Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Lauren Boebert prefer to act as disrupters, sabotaging the passage of negotiated legislation while offering few viable alternatives. (The lone remaining GOP holdout in the speaker election was Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning contrarian who is not a member of the Freedom Caucus but who has allegedly been called a a “dangerous nuisance” by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.)

Less than an hour after the somewhat dramatic election concluded, 11 members of the caucus posted a public warning letter to Johnson on social media. “Today we voted for Mike Johnson as speaker of the House because of our steadfast support of President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors,” the group wrote. “We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the Speaker’s track record over the past 15 months.” 

Returning to the shutdown example, Trump’s last-minute attempt to suspend the debt ceiling for two years in December was shunned by 38 Republican members of the House, many of whom are also members of the Freedom Caucus. While it is likely these members knew the legislation would fail because Democrats were also opposed to it, the message was clear: Even some MAGA Republicans are willing to defy Trump in the 119th Congress.