Harriet Hageman Randy Fine Keith Self DOGE Voting Rights Florida Texas Wyoming

Voters Fired the Republican Congress on Tuesday. Harriet Hageman, Randy Fine and Keith Self Want to Use Its Last Two Months to Lock In Trump's Agenda Before the New One Arrives.

Two days after Democrats won both chambers, Hageman called for another party-line budget bill to make the DOGE foreign-aid cuts permanent before the new Congress arrives. Fine said he'd stay 'around the clock until Jan. 3.' Self wants Trump's orders written into law and the SAVE America Act passed 'now while we can.'

MAGA Report Cards · Nov 07, 2026

Voters Fired the Republican Congress on Tuesday. Harriet Hageman, Randy Fine and Keith Self Want to Use Its Last Two Months to Lock In Trump's Agenda Before the New One Arrives. — Photo: Just the News

On Tuesday, voters gave Democrats control of the House and the Senate. Republicans still hold both until the new Congress is sworn in on January 3. Within three days, three of them were on conservative TV with a plan for those last weeks: pass as much as possible, as fast as possible, before the people voters just elected can take their seats.

Harriet Hageman, who won Wyoming's Senate seat on Tuesday, told Just the News on Thursday night that Republicans should pass another party-line budget bill before they lose power. "I think we ought to do another reconciliation package and fund some of these programs and agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target," she said.

Randy Fine of Florida went on the same show and signed up on the spot. "I think that's a great idea," he said. "I'm happy to stay there around the clock until Jan. 3 to get the job done for the American people."

And on Friday, Keith Self of Texas told Newsmax what he wants done before the gavel changes hands. "We need to codify as many of the president's EOs as we can," he said, meaning Trump's executive orders. "We need to pass the SAVE America Act through a Senate now while we can."

The trick they want to use

A normal bill needs 60 votes to get through the Senate. A budget bill only needs 51. That's why Hageman wants this one written as a budget bill. Republicans can pass it on a party-line vote without a single Democrat.

The second half of the plan is the veto. Once it's law, Democrats taking over in January would need to pass a repeal, and Trump would veto it. Just the News spelled out the goal: Trump could use his veto "to thwart Democrat efforts in the next Congress to overturn his priorities, thus securing them through the 2028 election."

So the plan is to lock in policies for two more years, written by a majority that voters just removed, and to make sure the majority they chose instead can't undo them.

What Hageman wants made permanent

Hageman listed what she wants in it: border and immigration money, Justice Department and FBI priorities, and the cuts Elon Musk's DOGE team made to foreign aid. "We need to make sure that the cutting of those programs stays permanent," she said.

This isn't a new idea for her. All three of these Republicans have already voted for both of the moves she wants to repeat.

The foreign-aid cuts. Hageman, Fine and Self all voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025, which cancelled money Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting: $9.4 billion when it first passed the House, 214 to 212, and about $9 billion when it cleared Congress in July 2025, after the Senate took out a $400 million cut to PEPFAR.

The immigration money. When Hageman says "we did it with reconciliation for the Department of Homeland Security just this summer," she means the June 9 bill that funded ICE through September 30, 2029, past the end of Trump's term. It passed the House 214 to 212. All three of them voted yes. As we reported when it passed, it gave ICE billions more with none of the limits Democrats had asked for, like body cameras and limits on masks.

She's asking for the same play again, aimed at whatever the next Congress might change.

What Self wants passed "now while we can"

Self's list starts with Trump's executive orders. Writing them into law would turn orders a new Congress could push back on into statutes that need a repeal Trump would veto. It's a project he started long before Tuesday: on one day in July 2025, he introduced four bills, and all four were Trump executive orders.

Next is the SAVE America Act. According to a House Republican summary quoted by Newsmax, it would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot. The House already passed it, 218 to 213. More than 21 million voting-age citizens don't have ready access to proof of citizenship, and we've written about who that shuts out, including married women who changed their names.

Self's reason for the rush was blunt. Before the new Congress, Republicans need to "fund the government deep into the next year so that we're not looking at Democrat cuts," he said. Then he added that they also need to deal with the debt ceiling, "because if the Democrats get in, they will just blow that out of the water."

Fine had his own version of why Republicans lost. "Part of the reason we lost the majority is voters didn't think we worked that hard," he said. "They saw the Senate not even trying to pass the Save America Act."

Their own Senate leader wasn't sure they had the votes

The idea isn't just Hageman's. Before the election, an anonymous House Republican told The Hill that Republicans "should unequivocally take immediate steps to pass a third reconciliation bill in the event we lose the House, and stay as long as it takes to get it done."

But the Senate's top Republican wasn't sure it could happen. "Right now, we don't have the votes to get on a third recon bill [and a] budget resolution," Senate Majority Leader John Thune told The Washington Sun before the election, as The Hill reported. "We might have them after [the midterms]." A Senate Republican aide told The Hill: "I think reconciliation is more unlikely than not."

Congress also has to fund the government by mid-December to avoid a shutdown, plus the farm bill and the yearly defense bill. A rushed budget bill would have to be squeezed in on top of all of that.

What the voters said

The same week, Hageman and Fine had given their explanation for Tuesday: Republicans had a "messaging" problem. As we wrote on Thursday, both of them voted for Trump's budget bill, the law expected to take health coverage from 7.5 million people.

Now the plan isn't to change what they passed. It's to pass more of it before voters' choice takes office.

Adding it up

Harriet Hageman, Randy Fine and Keith Self all want Republicans to use the weeks before January 3 to pass Trump's agenda through a Congress voters just turned over to Democrats. Hageman wants a party-line budget bill that would make the DOGE foreign-aid cuts permanent, Fine says he'll stay "around the clock" to pass it, and Self wants Trump's executive orders written into law and the SAVE America Act passed "now while we can." All three already voted for the roughly $9 billion in foreign-aid and public-broadcasting cuts in 2025 and for the June 2026 bill funding ICE through 2029.