On January 20, it was reasonable to suggest that the legislative output of Donald Trump’s second term would be as thin as the first, primarily due to the unwieldiness of the Republican coalition. The recent history of the House of Representatives suggested total dysfunction; they couldn’t even keep a Speaker for an entire term. House Democrats provided deciding votes for essentially all the major bills in 2023-2024, amid splits between mainstream Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus.
For a while, it seemed like Trump was operating on the principle that Congress was not worth dealing with. He could rule through edicts and executive orders and never trifle with the need to pass laws. The Supreme Court was all too willing to give whatever he scribbled on paper the force of law, anyway, so why bother with Capitol Hill.
But Trump eventually realized that Republicans in Congress were as willing to shrink in subservience to him as the Roberts Court. That includes the Freedom Caucus, whose vaunted principles no longer exist, if they were anything beyond cheap talk. Already they have passed a presidency’s worth of lawmaking in one deeply unpopular bill, with little pushback. This week, Republican lawmakers decided to hand over the power of the purse to the president, while rubber-stamping action on crypto that Trump is openly and brazenly using for self-enrichment.
On their own, these are not surprising outcomes. The Big Beautiful Bill cut taxes for the rich and social safety net supports for the poor; what Republican would be opposed? The appropriations-killing bill was filibuster-proof and only cut funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting, two things that had become so demonized by the right-wing media machine that their demise was virtually assured in a Republican government. And the crypto industry has fully purchased Washington; the crypto PAC Fairshake unsubtly announced it had amassed $141 million for the 2026 midterms the same week that votes on bills they wanted came up in the House.
But a closer look at what Republicans got done this week shows that Congress is enthusiastically taking its marching orders from the White House, with any deeply held convictions and the meaning of Congress as a coequal branch cast aside.
FOR A MOMENT, IT LOOKED LIKE “CRYPTO WEEK” was poised to become the national punch line that “infrastructure week” was in Trump’s first term. For two straight days, Freedom Caucus members blocked the rule for debate in the House that set up votes on three bills: the GENIUS Act that institutes light-touch rules for stablecoins, the CLARITY Act that transfers oversight of most digital assets to the business-friendly Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and a bill that prevents the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The Senate, with the help of more than a dozen Democrats, passed the GENIUS Act last month; it has been more lukewarm, at least so far, on the other two. The Trump family’s crypto company has a stablecoin and a number of other digital assets, and would personally benefit from these bills.
Leaders of the House committees with jurisdiction over crypto (the Financial Services Committee and, in an accident of history, the Agriculture Committee) wanted to put their stamp on these bills, and even bundle them together into one big crypto package. But Senate leaders warned this would mean nothing would pass, and the House leadership backed up their colleagues in the other chamber. Each bill would get a separate vote, with no changes to the GENIUS Act from the Senate’s final version.
That meant that the Freedom Caucus’s priority—the anti-CBDC bill—could be abandoned in the ping-ponging between the House and Senate. So the Freedom Caucus held up the rule, which meant nothing could pass the House, until they got assurances that their priority would pass.
A word on this priority: The Federal Reserve has taken essentially no steps in issuing a central bank digital currency. Conservatives claim they oppose a CBDC because of the threat of digital surveillance of personal information; I guess it’s OK that private crypto firms have that information, then. Indeed, there have been numerous crypto data breaches in recent years. The real reason pro-crypto lawmakers don’t want a CBDC is that it would represent a public alternative to the industry.
Anyway, the Freedom Caucus’s only leverage to force their anti-CBDC bill into one of the larger packages was to hijack the rule. They did this on Tuesday, until Trump made a deal in the Oval Office. But the deal, which stuffed the anti-CBDC bill into the CLARITY Act, wasn’t cleared with the heads of the other committees, and they nixed it. Now the Freedom Caucus was full-on upset, and they hijacked the rule on Wednesday for a second day.
But hours after this got going, it was over. The House agreed to link the anti-CBDC bill to the National Defense Authorization Act, a perennial must-pass package. But unlike virtually everything else in Congress, the NDAA goes through a conference committee where priorities often fall out. The Freedom Caucus wanted a guarantee on their priority by linking it to other crypto bills; what they got was the opposite, a wish and a hope in the defense bill.
It’s time to stop calling the Freedom Caucus “hard-liners.” They fall over in a mild breeze and everybody knows it. The rest of the House Republicans got rolled as well: The Senate isn’t very likely to take up their CLARITY Act, and they had to eat the Senate’s GENIUS Act without changes.
Meanwhile, the Senate was faced with a rescissions package of $9.4 billion in cuts that consisted of foreign aid and the elimination of public media funding for the next two years. These provisions were already appropriated by Congress, and killing them after the fact through a 50-vote Senate process after passing them with 60 votes offers a blueprint to the Trump administration to ignore appropriations altogether and get a smaller subset of the Senate to overturn whatever the president doesn’t like. Moreover, the Office of Management and Budget would have the final say on what would be cut; the Senate was just voting on broad categories.
Yes, the Senate managed to take $400 billion in cuts to AIDS prevention abroad out of the bill, leaving $9 billion in cuts. But Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said it wasn’t appropriate. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said that the vote “will amount to the House and Senate basically saying: We concede that decision voluntarily to the executive branch,” and he was “troubled” by it. “I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret” in the rescission vote, said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). They all voted for it, and it passed early Thursday morning, 51-48. The House came back late and rubber-stamped the final passage with the usual grumbling but no substantive changes.
This is getting to be a trend. Witness Josh Hawley introducing a bill to nullify the Medicaid cuts in the GOP mega-bill for which he was the deciding vote in favor just a couple of weeks ago. Republicans ignoring Emil Bove vowing to defy court orders and advancing him out of committee to become a federal judge is another example. It speaks to the pathetic display of Republicans checking their conscience at the Capitol Rotunda. They might as well send their voting privileges by proxy to the Oval Office.
Elections have consequences. America voted for a party that would cut taxes, militarize immigration enforcement, and rip up regulations, and it wasn’t hard to uncover these intentions. But they voted for members of Congress to be more than dittoheads. The Founders expected each branch of government to stand up for their constitutional prerogatives. They didn’t expect two of the three to take four years off.