DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
New year, new Congress. The 119th Congress begins Friday with Republican majorities in both chambers and quite a lot of business to do before President-elect Donald Trump once again takes the oath of office. Joining me now to talk about all this is NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Good morning, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning.
ESTRIN: OK, so one of the things that has to happen is a leadership vote in the House. And given some of the grumblings among House Republicans, it's not clear if the current speaker, Mike Johnson, is going to hold onto his gavel, right?
KEITH: Yeah, Republicans so narrowly control the House that there's not much margin of error for Johnson. He's been in a tenuous position for a while now, but the back-and-forth over that stopgap funding measure that eventually passed right before the holidays made his situation worse. As you might remember, he initially negotiated a bipartisan deal to keep the government funded and a bunch of other things in there. Then Elon Musk and President-elect Trump blew it up. Trump demanded that Congress clear the decks for him by suspending the debt ceiling, but Johnson ultimately couldn't deliver what Trump wanted. Now there are enough Republicans saying they aren't sure whether they'll support Johnson for speaker that he could be in real trouble. And Democrats are making it clear they have no intention of bailing him out this time if he loses support from Republicans because they're mad about how the end-of-the-year spending deal went down. Trump has been conspicuously quiet on what he thinks Johnson's fate should be.
ESTRIN: And, well, many of us will recall that it took several days and 15 rounds of voting for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker two years ago. But this time around, there's a bit of a time crunch for the Republican Party, right?
KEITH: Yeah, January 6 is the date Congress is set to count the Electoral College votes and certify that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. The bigger issue, though, is that Trump and his team want to hit the ground running on January 20. They want to get Trump's Cabinet in place quickly. They immediately want Congress to take big action on immigration, to spend more money on border security, and the last thing that GOP really needs is infighting, whether it's in the House over leadership or online like that battle royale between Elon Musk and various MAGA-world personalities this weekend over H-1B visas. Those are visas intended for skilled labor. But it has become a much bigger fight over Trump's mandate and what MAGA really represents.
ESTRIN: Getting back to the Cabinet picks, can you give us a quick rundown on the timeline?
KEITH: Yeah, so once Congress is in session January 3, the GOP-controlled Senate will start holding confirmation hearings. And the goal is to have these nominees fully vetted - these picks fully vetted and ready to go on January 20 when Trump is sworn in, and he can officially then nominate them. Last time, the Senate voted to confirm two of Trump's Cabinet secretaries on Day 1. Obama had six confirmed. The Senate generally tries to move quickly to help the president get his team in place, but there's some ongoing uncertainty around Trump's picks this time because he announced them so rapidly. And they didn't go through some of some of the usual vetting, and several of them are very controversial.
ESTRIN: That's NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Thanks for talking through all this with us.
KEITH: Glad to do it. Take care. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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