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Johnson appeases holdouts and unfreezes House floor

Valerie Yurk, CQ-Roll Call on

Published in News & Features

Speaker Mike Johnson narrowly freed the floor from another standstill Tuesday — but it’s not clear how long the good feeling will last.

The House adopted a rule for floor debate in a 215-211 vote after GOP leaders won over key holdouts by promising a markup of border security legislation before the August recess and taking steps to graft a voter ID bill onto a spending measure.

With such a slim majority, leadership can only afford to lose a few Republican votes for party-line measures.

Some previous holdouts, like Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, had been demanding movement on further efforts to codify White House immigration policies ahead of the midterm elections.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said earlier Tuesday that the conference was holding “a lot of meetings” on immigration legislation but was “not in agreement on the next approach.”

“Obviously, we did HR 2 last Congress. We did a lot in the One Big Beautiful Bill to secure the border. … We gave President Trump all the tools that he asked for in that bill to make sure that we have what is, right now, the securest border we’ve had in our country’s history,” he said.

After Tuesday’s vote, Scalise said “we still have some things to resolve” before holding any immigration vote on the floor. “They’ve got a markup. They’ve got some hearings. At the end of the day, we’re still not in agreement,” he said.

Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, said he expected to see a markup of an immigration measure in the Judiciary Committee next week. “All we discussed was getting a markup, which we did,” he said.

The holdouts had criticized their party’s leadership for not advancing enough of the Republican agenda while the party holds a trifecta majority in the White House and both chambers of Congress. But on Tuesday they helped the speaker return to business as usual on the floor and adopt the rule, teeing up consideration of a slate of bills, including the fiscal 2027 National Security-State spending measure.

It broke a stalemate that began before the Independence Day holiday, when a group of firebrand Republicans tanked a different rule in part to ratchet up pressure on the Senate to pass what’s known as the SAVE America Act — a sweeping voter ID and election bill that has little chance of advancing in that chamber.

 

Johnson, R-La., sent the House home roughly 24 hours after they gaveled in for the week, giving lawmakers an early and extended July Fourth holiday.

This time around, the speaker won over one of the previous holdouts, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., by including language in the rule that would stitch the voter ID bill to the end of the national security funding bill once it passes the House. The procedural process is known as a “MIRV,” borrowing an acronym from the ballistic missile that carries multiple warheads.

Luna wrote in a social media post Monday that she would allow the House to “try” the MIRV process — for now.

“If (Senate Majority Leader) John Thune strips it out in the Senate that will be on him and the entire country should be watching what he does,” she wrote. “If he wants to actively work against Voter I.D. & the SAVE America Act he must face the consequences of his actions.”

But Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said on the floor prior to the vote that Luna and other holdouts shouldn’t be so easily fooled.

“There is nothing in this rule that forces the Senate to take up the awful SAVE America Act. Nothing. … The Senate can and will strip it right back out. Everybody here knows that,” he said. “It is merely political theater designed to settle another Republican family feud. And if that’s enough to flip members who have held up business for weeks, boy, they are cheap dates.”

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Aris Folley, Jacob Fulton and Aidan Quigley contributed to this report.

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©2026 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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