Category Archives: House of Representatives

Missouri governor calls special session to redraw congressional maps to aid Republicans

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State follows Texas’s lead in Trump’s push to gain more House seats for Republicans in 2026 midterms

The Missouri governor, Mike Kehoe, has moved to help the Republican party gain an additional seat in Congress, calling a special legislative session to redraw congressional districts in his state.

Kehoe’s announcement on Friday followed a pressure campaign from Donald Trump, who has urged Republican states to reshape district boundaries to more heavily favor Republicans, boosting the party’s chances of maintaining control of the House of Representatives in 2026.

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Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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Pentagon official confirms plan as House minority leader Jeffries says president is ‘playing’ with Americans’ lives

Planning is underway to send national guard troops to Chicago, an official at the Pentagon confirmed to ABC News on Sunday.

“We won’t speculate on further operations. The Department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel,” a Department of Defense official said, according to ABC.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine

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Breaking from most of her peers in Congress, far-right Georgia Republican has also described crisis as a genocide

Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.

“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”

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Texas prepares for final approval of Republican map as senator threatens to filibuster

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Carol Alvarado posted on social media: ‘Republicans think they can walk all over us. Today I’m going to kick back’

The Texas legislature preliminarily approved a redrawn congressional map on Friday that gives Republicans a chance to pick up as many as five congressional seats, fulfilling a brazen political request from Donald Trump to shore up the GOP’s standing before next year’s midterm elections.

The tentative map adoption passed in an 18-11 party-line vote.

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California legislature approves first of three redistricting bills in response to Texas gerrymandering

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Assembly passes measure 57-20, sending it next to the state senate before on to governor Gavin Newsom

The California assembly on Thursday approved the first in a series of three bills designed to redraw congressional boundaries and create five potential new Democratic US House seats.

The effort in California is an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump and aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor before next year’s midterm elections.

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Democrats are fighting fire with fire over redistricting – but will democracy burn?

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Trump’s plan to boost Republican House seats in the midterms through gerrymandering has provoked a reaction

The mid-decade redistricting war looming between Republicans and Democrats is exposing an idea that’s corroding American democracy – voters may not matter that much in determining who controls the US House.

After Texas Republicans unveiled a Donald Trump-fueled plan to pick up five additional US House seats last month, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, unveiled a plan on Thursday to throw out districts drawn by an independent commission and put in place new ones that would add five Democratic seats in response. Republicans are also expected to push ahead with plans to redraw maps in Ohio, Missouri, Florida and possibly Indiana, in their favor.

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Speaker Mike Johnson visits occupied West Bank to support Israeli settlers

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Palestinian foreign ministry condemns Republican visit for ‘undermining efforts to stop the war and cycle of violence’

Mike Johnson became the highest ranked US official to visit the occupied West Bank on Monday, the Republican House speaker drawing measures of praise and condemnation for his trip in support of Israeli settlements amid a worsening starvation crisis in Gaza.

The excursion followed Johnson’s arrival in Israel on Sunday on an unannounced visit with other Republican lawmakers, and his meeting with Israeli defense minister Israel Katz and foreign minister Gideon Saar.

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Mike Johnson would have ‘great pause’ about a Ghislaine Maxwell pardon

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Another Republican says it should be on table, illustrating challenge posed by scandal for Maga base and the party

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Sunday he would have “great pause” about granting a pardon or commutation to Ghislaine Maxwell while another House Republican said it should be considered as part of an effort to obtain more information about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Donald Trump and his allies, including Johnson, have been under immense pressure to disclose more information about Epstein for weeks, especially amid scrutiny over the extent of Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The splits over what to do with Maxwell illustrate the complicated challenge posed by the scandal for Trump, his Maga base and the broader Republican party.

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US House passes Trump plan to cut $9bn from foreign aid, public broadcasting

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Along with Democrats, only two House Republicans voted against the cut

The US’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed president Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid early on Friday, sending it to the White House to be signed into law.

The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favor of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400m in funds for the global PEPFAR HIV/Aids prevention program.

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Adelita Grijalva wins Arizona Democratic primary for House seat

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Grijalva beat Gen Z activist Deja Foxx in the race and will succeed her late father, Raúl Grijalva, in the role

Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide.

Raúl Grijalva, a longtime congressman in southern Arizona, died from cancer earlier this year and left a vacancy in the state’s seventh district. The younger Grijalva, a 54-year-old who served for 20 years on a Tucson school board, has been a Pima county supervisor since 2020.

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Republicans complain to Canada over wildfire smoke despite supporting planet-heating bill

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Lawmakers send letter railing against ‘suffocating’ smoke days after voting for Trump plan likely to boost pollution

A group of Republican lawmakers has complained that smoke from Canadian wildfires is ruining summer for Americans, just days after voting for a major bill that will cause more of the planet-heating pollution that is worsening wildfires.

In a letter sent to Canada’s ambassador to the US, six Republican members of Congress wrote that wildfire smoke from Canada had been an issue for several years and recently their voters “have had to deal with suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke filling the air to begin the summer”.

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Elon Musk’s proposed new political party could focus on a few pivotal congressional seats

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Billionaire said his ‘America party’ would try to turn attainable House and Senate seats to decide major issues

The new US political party that Elon Musk has boasted about possibly bankrolling could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.

Tesla and SpaceX’s multibillionaire CEO mused about that approach on Friday in a post on X, the social media platform which he owns, as he continued feuding with Donald Trump over the spending bill that the president has signed into law.

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Twisted arms and late-night deals: how Trump’s sweeping policy bill was passed

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With narrow majorities and intra-party splits, Republicans faced a battle to give Trump his bill to sign – but they did it

Just a few months ago, analysts predicted that Republicans in Congress – with their narrow majorities and fractured internal dynamics – would not be able to pass Donald Trump’s landmark legislation.

On Thursday, the president’s commanding influence over his party was apparent once again: the bill passed just in time for Trump’s Fourth of July deadline.

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Trump makes case for ‘big, beautiful bill’ and cranks up pressure on Republicans

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President calls for passage of signature tax bill but it’s not yet clear whether Senate Republicans have sufficient votes

Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen whether his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.

The president’s intervention comes as the Senate majority leader, John Thune, mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, before a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.

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Eyes on Senate Republicans as Trump and Musk feud over tax and spend bill

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Lawmakers still weighing whether to pass ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ at root of rift between US president and tech boss

As the simmering tensions between Donald Trump and his once top adviser, the billionaire Elon Musk, erupted into public view on Thursday, eyes turned to the Republican lawmakers still weighing whether to pass the president’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill”.

It was approved by just a single vote in the House of Representatives with no Democratic support last month, and nonpartisan analysts have found the sweeping legislation could add a whopping $2.4tn-$5tn to the $36.2tn US national debt and make deep cuts to Medicaid and food-assistance programs. Seen as an outline of Trump’s “America first” agenda, the bill would also extend tax cuts, fund beefed-up immigration enforcement and impose new work requirements for enrollees of federal safety net programs.

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US budget chief calls fears that cuts to benefits will lead to deaths ‘totally ridiculous’

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Russ Vought defends Trump’s sweeping tax-cut bill that will slash safety net programs Medicaid and Snap

The White House budget director Russ Vought on Sunday dismissed as “totally ridiculous” fears expressed by voters that cuts to benefits in the huge spending bill passed by the House will lead to premature deaths in America.

Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill act, now awaiting debate in the US Senate, will slash two major federal safety net programs, Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries, which will affect millions of people if it becomes law.

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Top Republicans threaten to block Trump’s spending bill if national debt is not reduced

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Prominent US senators warn Trump to ‘get serious’ about addressing budget deficit or they will block ‘beautiful bill’

Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”.

Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”

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House passes Trump’s sweeping tax-cut bill, sends it to Senate

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Measure would tighten eligibility for health and food programs for the poor and could add $3.8tn to US debt

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives narrowly passed a sweeping tax and spending bill that would enact much of President Donald Trump’s policy agenda on Thursday and saddle the country with trillions of dollars in debt.

The bill would fulfill many of Trump’s populist campaign pledges, delivering new tax breaks on tips and car loans and boosting spending on the military and border enforcement. It will add about $3.8tn to the federal government’s $36.2tn in debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

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RFK Jr tells Congress ‘people shouldn’t take medical advice from me’

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Health secretary demurs on questions about vaccine stance and defends Republican plans to cut healthcare

The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, refused to say whether he would vaccinate his children if he had to choose today, and defended Republicans’ proposal to cut healthcare to fund tax cut extensions.

Kennedy’s back-to-back testimonies before House and Senate committees were his first appearances before lawmakers since his confirmation in February. The secretary was called to discuss Donald Trump’s proposed budget, which would impose disproportionately large cuts to scientific enterprises at the health department.

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New bill aims to allow research to catch up with US’s increasing cannabis consumption

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Legislation would radically ease research restrictions on cannabis and other schedule I substances

A recently introduced bill, if it passes, would allow research on cannabis despite its schedule I status, which some experts say could help policymakers “craft effective” legislation in the future and potentially allow more clinical research on medical cannabis.

Representatives Dina Titus and Ilhan Omar introduced the Evidence-Based Drug Policy Act of 2025 (EBDPA) last week, which would radically ease research restrictions on cannabis and other schedule I substances.

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