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Republicans head into lame-duck session leaderless, with a funding cliff and a long to-do list

Speaker Johnson is out. The farm bill is dead. FISA has been lapsed for months. Democrats won both chambers Tuesday and now watch as the Republican-led Congress returns Nov. 9 to clean up its own mess before December 11.

The 119th Congress, still controlled by Republicans until January 3, returns to Washington on Monday, November 9, for a lame-duck session that has everything a legislative crunch typically offers: a hard funding deadline, two major expired laws, an unresolved defense bill, and no clear House Republican leader to cut the deals.

Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress on November 3, and the current Republican-led Congress returns November 9 for a lame-duck session before a December 11 funding deadline. The session is shaping up as one of the most complicated in recent memory, partly because the people who lost on Tuesday still hold the gavels.

Johnson out, leadership race begins Monday

Speaker Mike Johnson will be stepping aside from Republican Party leadership after the GOP's wipeout in the midterm election, declining to seek support to stay on as House minority leader in the new Congress. The Louisiana conservative told staffers at a closed-door meeting that he won't lead the Republican caucus in the next Congress, when Democrats will hold a large majority.

House Republicans must first choose their leader on November 10, with Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan running to replace Speaker Johnson. The outcome will determine who negotiates the funding bill with Democrats during the lame duck and who leads the minority afterward.

On the Senate side, Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said before the election that he expected to seek another term as leader regardless of whether Republicans won or lost control of the chamber, and a Thune spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that he is running for minority leader.

The powerful speaker's gavel is expected to pass to Democrats, who are preparing to nominate House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York for the job, second in line to the president. Democrats are expected to have a majority of around 75 seats, a far cry from the razor-thin margin Republicans had during Johnson's tenure.

December 11: the only hard deadline

The stopgap bill that President Donald Trump signed on September 2, now Public Law 119-103, keeps every federal agency funded through Friday, December 11, 2026. That gives the lame-duck Congress roughly five weeks, minus a Thanksgiving recess, to either pass full-year appropriations, another stopgap, or watch parts of the government shut down.

Lawmakers have three roads: pass full-year spending bills, pass another short-term extension, or let funding lapse on December 12. A second stopgap would push the real decisions into the new Congress, where Democrats would have more say, which is the main reason both parties watch this deadline closely.

Republicans are also weighing one more maneuver before they lose the majority. Republicans are weighing a debt-limit increase before Democrats take over, which would remove a borrowing deadline that analysts say could arrive in early to mid-2027 as a source of leverage against Trump, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said it could come in the lame duck.

Farm bill, FISA, and the defense authorization

The legislative pile is not just about funding. The farm bill expired on September 30, and the surveillance authority known as FISA Section 702 has been lapsed since June. Neither has been resolved.

The principal question on the farm bill is no longer whether the Senate will produce a framework but whether House and Senate negotiators can bridge the remaining differences, particularly over SNAP state cost-sharing, during the post-election lame-duck session. The lame duck will decide Farm Bill 2.0, a farm aid package that now sits around $11 billion, with farm-state pressure for $17 billion or more.

FISA Section 702, described as a critical national security measure, expired earlier in the year, and lawmakers will likely try again in the lame duck. The authority allows warrantless collection of foreign communications abroad and is used by intelligence agencies across the government.

The December 11 funding deadline will be the principal forcing mechanism, while the NDAA, WRDA, Farm Bill, permitting reform, surface transportation, healthcare extenders, tax provisions, and other expiring authorities compete for limited legislative time.

Democrats winning, then waiting

Democrats will flip control of both the House and Senate in a resounding and historic victory. They capitalized on President Donald Trump's historic unpopularity to win a major victory and significant power to check his final two years in office.

Democrats won key Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. A day after polls closed, Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi remained too close to call. In Mississippi, Democratic nominee Scott Colom was leading Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by just 65 votes out of 945,587 cast, with an estimated 95 percent of the vote counted, according to the Associated Press.

Trump told Fox News that Democrats did a "good job" and "fought hard," and he told The New York Times he will accept the results, shutting down, for now, questions about whether he would challenge the outcome.

But Democrats arriving in January face their own constraints. Democrats plan first-100-hours votes on ACA subsidies, Medicaid, tariffs, and Iran, plus probes by Garcia and Raskin, but face a 60-vote Senate threshold and Trump's veto. Whatever Republicans lock in during the lame duck, from spending levels to a possible debt-limit increase, will shape the starting position for every one of those fights.

This year's lame-duck session could be the last weeks of unified Republican control of Congress and the White House. That framing is shaping every calculation in both parties as leaders tally what they can still move and what they are willing to give the other side before January 3.

What to Watch

  • House Republican leader vote, November 10: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) are among the candidates for Republican leader. The winner runs the minority in the new Congress and negotiates funding with Democrats right away.
  • December 11 funding deadline: A continuing resolution keeps most federal agencies running only until December 11. If Congress does not pass full-year spending bills or another short-term extension by then, parts of the government would shut down.
  • Mississippi Senate race: With Colom leading Hyde-Smith by 65 votes and roughly 5 percent of ballots still uncounted, the final margin could affect the Senate's composition during the lame duck itself.
  • Debt-limit gambit: Watch whether Thune can hold enough Republican votes to pass a debt-limit increase before January 3, depriving the incoming Democratic majority of a key piece of leverage over Trump's last two years.
  • FISA Section 702: Intelligence officials have been pressing for reauthorization since the authority lapsed in June. Whether it moves as a standalone bill or as a rider to the spending package will be a flashpoint between civil liberties advocates and national security hawks in both parties.

Sources

WDCM Editorial
Written by

WDCM Editorial is the byline on news and feature stories produced through Washington DC Magazine's editorial process — AI-assisted research, reviewed and approved by Editor-in-Chief Rod Wright.

EDITOR IN CHIEF: RODRIQUEZ WRIGHT II

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