Nia-Malika Henderson, Columnist

Congress Showed What’s Coming Next in Five Key Moments

The House and Senate packed a lot of drama into the first half of the year. But clear patterns have emerged.

July 25, 2025 at 10:30 AM UTC

Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades.

Choppy waters ahead.
Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

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As lawmakers head off for their August recess, what they did and didn’t do over the past seven months tells us a lot about what will happen over the next 17. The GOP-controlled Congress operated as an extension of President Donald Trump, with pockets of (performative) resistance that always folded to his demands. Democrats could do little to block Trump’s transformative agenda as he upended the federal government, shuttered federal agencies and rewrote policy with a stroke of his pen. This has all set up the stakes and strategy for the midterms in 2026, a preview of which will likely unfold as lawmakers hear from their constituents over the next four weeks.

In particular, there were five telling moments over the first seven months of the 119th Congress that tell us a lot about what to expect next: