Johnson Says This Could Be ‘Most Consequential Congress’ of Modern Times

Johnson Says This Could Be ‘Most Consequential Congress’ of Modern Times

Johnson at his news conference Tuesday
NurPhoto
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Happy Tuesday! Congress is back, and House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Republicans are “ready to deliver on America’s mandate” by working with President-elect Donald Trump. Lawmakers will have plenty of other business to tend to during their lame-duck session, including government funding legislation, the annual defense authorization bill and the farm bill. But first…

Wednesday is slated to be busy, as Trump is expected to meet with Johnson in the morning before heading to the White House for an Oval Office meeting with President Joe Biden. House and Senate Republicans are also slated to hold elections to formally choose their leadership for the 119th Congress. Johnson will reportedly face an ultraconservative challenge for the speaker’s gavel, while on the Senate side, Sens. John Thune of South Dakota, John Cornyn of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida are all vying for the job of majority leader.

Here's what you should know tonight.

Johnson Says This Could Be ‘Most Consequential Congress’ of Modern Times

Lawmakers returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday as Washington prepares for a major shift in power following Republicans’ apparent clean sweep of the White House and congressional control in last week's elections. President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning return to the White House is already influencing the political dynamics, even as the 118th Congress attempts to wrap up its final business during the post-election lame-duck session, with a to-do list that includes funding the government ahead of a December 20 deadline, providing additional disaster relief aid and, in the Senate, confirming a slew of federal judges.

Standing on the steps of the Capitol with his leadership team, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday morning that he has not yet settled on a strategy for the upcoming government funding deadline. Some Republican lawmakers are calling for a short-term bill that pushes the deadline into March, while others, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, want to pass a bill that covers the rest of the fiscal year, ensuring that the potentially contentious issue does not cloud the first weeks of Trump’s second term in office, when Republicans want to focus on enacting the incoming president’s agenda.

Johnson said he “can make a case for a number of different options that are on the table,” but he wants to hear from Trump before deciding. “The president's preference on that will carry a lot of weight obviously,” he said, referring to the president-elect.

The preferred approach could emerge in the next week following planned consultations with Trump, both on Wednesday in Washington and over the weekend in Florida. “My plan is to be at Mar-a-Lago all weekend to iron out details on the plans ahead,” Johson said.

Senate Democrats will also have some say on the funding plan, with Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer reportedly unlikely to agree to a clean stopgap measure while he still has leverage over the legislation. Schumer and Democrats may press for extra disaster relief funding or other concessions if Republicans look to pass a short-term spending extension, or they may push for a full-year spending deal.

More broadly, Johnson signaled that the Republican leadership aims to start working on the Trump agenda as quickly as possible once the new Congress convenes on January 3, 2025. “We are ready to deliver on America’s mandate,” Johnson said. “We will be ready day one. We are prepared this time.”

Saying that Republicans plan “to raise an ‘America First’ banner above this place,” Johnson also made it clear that he sees the upcoming legislative effort in fairly dramatic terms. “I told President Trump many times, as we’ve all discussed, we believe we could be the most consequential Congress in the modern era, and he the most consequential president, because we quite literally have to fix almost every metric of public policy,” he said. “Everything is a mess. Everything.”

Sickest Patients Fleeing Medicare Advantage Add Billions in Taxpayer Costs: Report

A new analysis by The Wall Street Journal finds that the sickest Medicare Advantage patients tend to drop their private insurance plans for traditional Medicare far more often than other enrollees, leading to billions of dollars in savings for the insurance companies — and billions in higher costs for taxpayers.

“People in the final year of their lives left Medicare Advantage for traditional Medicare at double the rate of other enrollees from 2016 to 2022,” the Journal’s Anna Wilde Mathews, Christopher Weaver and Tom McGinty report. “Those private-plan dropouts—300,075 during that time span—often had long hospital and nursing-home stays after they left, running up large bills that taxpayers, not their former insurers, had to pay.”

The Journal’s report notes that Medicare Advantage enrollees may have more difficulty getting care as they get sicker. “That’s because the insurers actively manage the care, including requiring patients to get approval for certain services and limiting which hospitals and doctors patients can use,” the Journal says.

Over the years studied, Medicare Advantage insurers avoided $10 billion in medical costs incurred by patients who switched their coverage, according to the analysis. “If those beneficiaries had stayed in their plans,” the Journal says, “the government would have paid the insurers about $3.5 billion in premiums, meaning the companies netted more than $6 billion in savings during that period.”

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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