This week offered a fitting snapshot of House Republicans’ struggle to govern with a razor-thin majority: Some votes fell short, others were abandoned altogether, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) sent the chamber home after several Republicans crossed party lines to demand that President Donald Trump curtail the war in Iran.
The chaotic series of votes was just the latest high-wire act for Republicans. The party’s small majority has made even routine votes difficult, drama-filled events with absences, deaths and defections often giving the GOP only one or two votes to spare.
That dynamic has severely limited the number of major bills that make it to the president’s desk and contributed to three government shutdowns. Lawmakers, now in full campaign mode, will have only that handful of major bills to run on: After this week, the House will be out until after Election Day for an extended campaign season recess.
Much of the House’s time has been consumed by prolonged battles over spending — including one in 2025 that sparked the longest government shutdown in history. Still, the House was able to enact vast swaths of the Republican agenda through the One Big Beautiful Bill — a massive tax and immigration law that reshaped much of the federal government and the U.S. economy.
It did so narrowly, by just four votes, by relying on a persuasion operation led by two men: Trump and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota).
As majority whip, Emmer’s job is to wrangle his party’s lawmakers into backing legislation, and in interviews with The Washington Post he said he does so by running “a customer service office” where the members “are our customers.”
“The customer is right, and even when the customer is wrong, the customer is right. That’s the attitude,” Emmer said, ensconced in his office full of hockey paraphernalia and photos of him with his family, Trump and the Stanley Cup. “Leadership really is not telling people what to do; it’s trying to help them do what they came here to do.”
Once Emmer and his team have holdouts on any given bill “whittled down to” a handful of Republicans who can’t be moved, they call on the president for what has often been much-needed assistance.
Emmer said he and his aides remember the many times they had to wrestle with the conference with a mix of frustration, fondness and urgency.
“Just the size of the lift, and the compressed time to get it over the finish line, and just the intensity — people [get] very emotional,” Emmer said. “Which is why you’ve got to go at them with a sense of humor.”
How House Republicans got bills passed
In the spring of 2025, Trump gave Congress a deadline: He wanted the One Big Beautiful Bill, which contained a number of his campaign promises, on his desk by July 4.
The Senate passed its version of the bill with significant new provisions on July 1. Immediately, around 20 House Republicans, both moderates and hard-right conservatives, raised objections to it. Johnson, Emmer and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) had about 48 hours to secure those votes, since, at that time, they could only afford to lose three lawmakers.
While Emmer is the whip, Scalise and Johnson are also key to marshaling members, negotiating with holdouts on the floor and dictating when measures are ready for a vote. That operation clicked into gear that day.
As the clock ticked, the speaker held a vote open for over six hours as Emmer and Scalise worked to sway lawmakers opposed to the bill. As the deadline neared, the president was called. Trump invited some of the hard-right holdouts into the White House and reached out to members whom Emmer identified as needing an extra push.
Ultimately, the bill passed on July 3, 2025, by a vote of 218-214 along party lines.
It was the party’s first big win of the second Trump administration, and it cemented a formula that Emmer and his team have often returned to this Congress for their larger victories, like this year’s Secure America Act, as well as smaller measures, like a recent defense appropriations bill.
The team has not always been able to get measures passed under the wire. Due to inter-GOP debate and failed dealmaking with Democrats, Republican House leaders presided over three government shutdowns during this Congress; together, those shutdowns lasted more than 100 days — a record.
Legislation reopening the government in two of those shutdowns passed the House by narrow margins, following the same pattern as most other bills this session.
Emmer said that he wasn’t sure the conference would be able to get it together on the recent defense package. That, he noted, is how this House has operated over the past year and a half, and he argued that those wins show that the size of a majority is not as important as it may seem.
“I hate the narrative … about the slimmest majority ever,” Emmer said. “I don’t give a damn if it’s a half a vote. It’s a majority.”
Republican members said they were usually willing to cooperate with leadership because Emmer and his team treat each vote as a clean slate.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), for example, said that while she is “on the higher part of their list of people they have to worry about on certain votes,” Emmer and his team “have never once held it against me.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), another lawmaker who sometimes votes against leadership, said he found the same to be true, and that even when they disagree, the whip knows he can’t afford to alienate anyone.
“They’re going to need me on the next go-round,” said Burchett, who told The Post he didn’t initially like Emmer but is “very fond of him” now.
Both lawmakers added that often, in tight votes, the Trump card kicks in.
“Sometimes it’s the president who has to break the stalemate,” Mace said.
Chip Roy (R-Texas), a fiscal and immigration hawk who has also repeatedly opposed leadership this session over funding bills, told The Post that there are “some things” Emmer and House leadership should have done differently over the past year — but he acknowledged that “they’ve been dealing with a very tough environment.”
“I think they are trying to do the best they can … to try to move the ball,” he said. “And frankly, we’ve delivered on a lot of stuff. Senate hadn’t done crap.”
The GOP has sometimes had to rely on Democrats
Things have not always gone the way GOP leaders might have hoped, however. The narrowness of their majority has meant that the party has, at times, had to rely on Democratic assistance to get things done.
Late last month, for instance, Roy and Andy Harris (R-Maryland) threatened to vote against a procedural measure to bring votes to the floor. The threats were enough to make many in the House think votes would be canceled.
Republican leaders, however, were spared by two moderate Democrats — Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington) — who voted with them. The move appalled Democratic leadership (rarely, if ever, does the minority party help the majority party pass procedural votes), but Emmer said the whole ordeal was just a stroke of good luck.
That luck has also run the other way, when the slim margin has allowed a handful of Republicans to team up with Democrats to advance their priorities, including forcing the release of federal files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over Trump’s objections and, as seen this week, on votes forced by Democrats demanding Trump end the war in Iran.
These moments offered Democrats a preview of what it might be like if they win back the House majority in this year’s midterms. If they manage to do so, it would probably be with a slim majority, in which any one or two members can wreak havoc.
But, even as Democrats become increasingly optimistic about their chances, Emmer has refused to entertain talk about Republicans losing the majority. Instead, he said he is focused on the critical appropriations bills the House has to pass before December.
When asked what comes next for him if Republicans do lose the House — particularly amid speculations that the GOP leader spot, which Emmer has run for before, may be open — Emmer insists that he already has “the best job in the House.”
“I get to work with all the members, I still get to do the campaign stuff,” he said. “It’s just something that I actually enjoy doing. Why change something that’s working?”
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