Midway through the first round of counting in this year’s speaker of the House election, on January 3, the political landscape for incumbent Mike Johnson’s reelection campaign was looking dire.

With an extremely narrow majority and a Democratic caucus united in opposition to his reelection bid, the Donald Trump–endorsed incumbent speaker could afford only one GOP defection to reach 218 votes on the House floor. A weeks-long pledge by libertarian-leaning representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) to vote against Johnson meant that the speaker had zero room for error.

Slowly, the defections ticked up: By the end of the alphabetical roll call, nine House Republicans had either voted no or abstained from the vote altogether.

Then, the tide began to turn. At the end of the roll call, the clerk returned to the half dozen GOP members who had stayed silent in opposition to Johnson: Representatives Chip Roy (Texas), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Michael Cloud (Texas), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), and Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris (Md.). One by one, they all voted yes.

To flip two of the nays — Keith Self (Texas) and Ralph Norman (S.C.) — before the vote closed, Nancy Mace (S.C.) dialed up Donald Trump. Why, the president-elect wanted to know, were they sowing so much chaos roughly two weeks out from his own swearing-in?

For Self and Norman, the Trump phone call was enough. They caved to the president-elect’s pressure and switched to yes on Johnson before the vote closed, so the speaker could win reelection despite Massie’s unchanged no vote. For now, at least, Johnson wouldn’t go the way of his ousted Republican predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

And yet the floor theatrics from this band of malcontents sent a clear message to the newly reelected speaker: Trump’s blessing means we’ll let you hold on to your job for the time being, but don’t expect the honeymoon to last when the legislative calendar heats up.

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Republicans enter the new Congress with an uncommon trifecta in Washington — control of the Senate, the House, and the White House — and ambitious plans to codify Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges into law. But since early December, congressional GOP leaders have been mired in process-oriented standoffs over how to move these big-ticket legislative items to the president’s desk through reconciliation, a budget process that circumvents the Senate’s 60-vote threshold by allowing both chambers to pass legislation with a simple majority vote.

Democrats are already getting the popcorn ready.

“Their margins are so slim, everyone’s a king or a queen over there. There’s a lot of competing self-interest,” Maxwell Frost, a progressive representative from Florida, said in a recent interview.

Congressional GOP leaders are in talks with the Trump White House about how to prioritize his agenda. Senate Republicans, buoyed by their new 53-seat majority, favor a two-bill strategy that would deliver an early legislative victory for Trump on energy, defense, and border security while punting a complicated tax fight until the end of the year.

Talk of this two-track approach has enraged House GOP Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith, the lower chamber’s principal tax writer, who argues that prioritizing those three legislative items will cast tax reform aside. Many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are set to expire at the end of 2025, so there’s a narrowing window of time to renew them before most Americans get hit with a tax increase.

Johnson and the House Budget Committee chairman, Jodey Arrington, agree. They insist that the best way to corral their slim and fractious House GOP conference into submission on renewing the TCJA is to lump all of Trump’s legislative priorities into “one big, beautiful bill” — tax cuts included. Sweeteners on border security, the theory goes, will help win over House Freedom Caucus skeptics who are expected to pitch a fit over the bill’s still undetermined price tag.

The path ahead won’t be easy, considering that Congress will also have a debt-ceiling fight on its hands in early 2025, and some members of the House GOP conference believe that excessive spending presents the largest existential threat to the country’s future.

“Our biggest enemy” is the nation’s fiscal cliff, says Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.), a proud fiscal hawk who voted for the ouster of Speaker McCarthy in October 2023 over spending-related concerns. “It’s not the Chinese, it’s not the border.”

Many budget hard-liners are expected to oppose reconciliation legislation unless the final text includes massive spending cuts. The speaker vote on January 3 was “all about” reining in spending, adds Self, the Texas Republican who initially opposed Johnson before switching his vote. “If we do not get our spending under control, this country is in trouble. We’re at a tipping point, period. We’re spending way too fast.” A host of Biden-era programs should be put on the chopping block in tandem with reconciliation, he says, including programs on climate policy and student-loan forgiveness. “But it’s more than that. What agency should we cut? What sub-agency should we cut?”

Further complicating the tax component of reconciliation negotiations are the president’s own campaign promises to end taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security income. Trump also pledged to address the TCJA’s expiring cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, a controversial tax write-off for residents of high-tax states. Under the current cap, individual and married joint filers can deduct from their federal income taxes only up to $10,000 that they pay in their state and local taxes. The SALT deduction is seen by fiscal conservatives as a subsidy for progressive governance in high-tax states, but it’s beloved by many blue-state Republicans who see the write-off as a necessary reprieve from the high-tax policies set by the Democratic officials in their state.

House Republicans from New York, New Jersey, and California are looking for a middle-ground deduction-cap number that is palatable to their constituents as well as their fiscally conservative colleagues. “Do we cap it at a certain income so it truly benefits the middle class?” asks Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee who flew to Mar-a-Lago in early January to discuss the issue with Trump. “Do we index [the cap] going forward so it will gradually go up to keep pace with inflation, like the standard deduction does? Do we limit the property tax portion of SALT so it can be applied only to your primary residence?”

Tax writers behind the TCJA slashed the formerly unlimited deduction, reducing it to $10,000 to help offset the cost of the bill, prompting many blue-state Republicans to vote against the final text in 2017. Pro-SALT Republicans say they have more leverage this time around, given the slim GOP margins, and some are already threatening to vote against a 2025 bill unless this year’s tax writers give them big concessions by increasing the amount taxpayers may deduct.

“They’re the ones drawing red lines, saying that they’re not going to support a reconciliation bill or any tax cuts unless it includes SALT-deduction-reform language,” Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.) said in a recent interview. Leadership, he said, has asked people not to draw such red lines.

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Veterans of the Hill are still haunted by the early months of the first Trump administration, when congressional GOP leaders invested all their energy in trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and came up empty. There’s been quite a bit of staff and member turnover since then. But Ted Cruz was there; he’s now the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, and he’s worried about a repeat.

During a closed-door meeting between Trump and GOP senators at the start of the new year, Cruz joined a handful of his colleagues in urging the president to oppose Johnson’s one-track approach. “What I said to President Trump is I believe we should take up two reconciliation bills this year,” Cruz recalled in a recent interview with National Review. “The first one should address border security and energy and rebuilding the military. Why those three? Because there is Republican unity and consensus on those three topics.”

Like Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Budget Committee chairman Lindsey Graham, Cruz is worried that one mammoth reconciliation bill will crumble under its own weight. “When we passed the Trump tax cuts in 2017, I spent hundreds of hours negotiating provisions of that bill,” Cruz recalled. “Tax reform is, by its nature, a long, extended discussion that involves complex trade-offs. It’s not going to happen in a month.”

Speaker Johnson insists that this calculus completely misses the mark. “I have a much more complex decision matrix than the Senate does,” he told Politico earlier this month. “And sometimes I feel like that may be underappreciated by some of our colleagues in the other chamber.”