Johnson's GOP Majority Rests on Tax Breaks and Cuts

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he has raised nearly half a billion dollars for House Republicans as he tries to retain a narrow majority that passed major tax breaks and social-service cuts. Votes often came down to the wire. The Nov. 3 midterms will decide whether Republicans keep control.

The votes behind the agenda

Johnson has kept the Republican majority together to advance President Trump's agenda despite high prices, the Iran war and razor-thin House margins. The bill he led paired tax breaks with cuts to social services. The article gives no estimate of the tax breaks' value or how many people the cuts affected.

Republican Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina joined Johnson on the campaign swing and described the repeated effort to secure votes. “So many times everybody had written off, there was no way he was going to be able to pull off a particular vote. Yet he always seems to pull out the win in the end,” Harris said.

Johnson said Republicans would pursue “less taxes, less regulation” if they kept power. He also said Trump “wants to go big for his legacy,” adding, “We have big things on the horizon that we can do.”

Johnson told the Associated Press he expected Republicans to keep what he called a “working majority,” though “It's not going to be a giant majority.” He pointed to crowds he had seen while campaigning, the quality of Republican recruits and incumbents, and the nearly half billion dollars he had raised. He said he expected to visit more than 20 states and 40 congressional districts through November.

Congress, the president and the war

Johnson recently sent lawmakers home early instead of facing a vote forced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Lawmakers were trying to stop the Iran war, which Congress had not authorized.

Asked whether Congress had given up power as Trump sought to expand executive authority, Johnson said, “Absolute nonsense.” He said, “We did not yield Article 1 authority to the president,” and added, “We used our own,” to advance Republican priorities over Democratic opposition.

The article said Trump had purged House Republicans viewed as disloyal, including Massie, who lost his primary, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who retired early after breaking with Trump over releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Johnson said he was preparing changes to House rules if he returned as speaker: “There's going to be some changes that are going to make the machinery work smoother.”

Johnson became speaker in 2023 after renegade Republicans ousted his predecessor, then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. Before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Johnson organized support for Trump's false claims of widespread fraud in the election Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. He later handed Trump a speaker's gavel as Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. Critics saw the gift as surrendering the authority of a coequal branch of government.

The campaign and its alternatives

Johnson has centered his campaign on Democrats he calls “communists.” A handful of far-left liberals backed by the Democratic Socialists of America were on the ballot. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader who would be in line for the speaker's gavel if Democrats won control, was preparing a first-100-days agenda for a new Congress that would convene in January if control changed.

Johnson said the political mood brought to mind the 2024 election that gave Republicans control of Congress and the White House. He has said he expects to buck the pattern of the president's party often losing seats in midterm elections. He recently joked to Fox News that if Republicans lost power, he might return to Shreveport, Louisiana, and start a lawn-care business.

Johnson also pointed to his faith in his appeal to voters. “I pray for God's will. And I believe God's will is for us — and not the communists — to be in charge of America,” he said. He added, citing 1 Corinthians 9:24, “This is a biblical admonition. So we will.”