Last week, Washington Post’s Paul Kane profiled House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s (R-La.) critical leadership in the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and examined his role as the most tenured member of Congressional leadership. To see highlights of the piece, see below. To read the full article, click here.
When House Majority Leader Steve Scalise looks around the leadership table these days, he realizes no one else played even a small role in the last big GOP tax-cut bill in 2017.

“Everybody else is new. It’s amazing when you think about how much turnover there’s been,” the Louisiana Republican said.

Scalise serves as the leader tasked with educating the relative newcomers about mistakes of the past while trying to push their sweeping conservative agenda across the legislative finish line.

Scalise, 59, has found something close to political solace, effectively, as the COO for the House implementing day-to-day tasks, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) in the CEO role managing relationships with the Senate, President Donald Trump and key party holdouts on big votes.

That paid off early Thursday when, despite the smallest majority in almost 100 years, House Republicans narrowly passed the massive tax-and-border-security package with not a single vote to spare.

When the gavel fell, Scalise gave a high-five to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota) before embracing him. Behind them, the three chiefs of staff for Johnson, Scalise and Emmer all jumped into one another’s arms in a group bear hug.

“It shows you how much better things are,” Scalise said in an interview Thursday.

Less than two years ago, all three were engaged in a leadership game of musical chairs, following the far-right flank’s decision to eject Kevin McCarthy (R-California) from the top job.

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Making matters worse, Scalise had just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma blood cancer, which included some intensive and debilitating treatments while also fueling rumors pushed by his internal foes. That followed the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice in which Scalise was within minutes of dying.

“There were people trying to spread a rumor that I had six months to go, and obviously that wasn’t true. And a lot of those other things were disgustingly false, deliberate lies. But look, this is a rough-and-tumble business. I have no qualms about that,” Scalise said in a 45-minute interview Tuesday in his third-floor Capitol suite, looking out onto the National Mall, one of two interviews we had for this column.

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Rather than sulking away from politics, Scalise hunkered down and fashioned a strong relationship with his fellow Louisianan, whom he’s known for decades.

He’s now the elder statesman of an incredibly green leadership team. During the 2017 effort to pass President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cut plan, Johnson was just months into his congressional service and Emmer was starting his second term. Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Michigan), now the No. 4 GOP leader, was working in the financial services industry.

Having won his first election in 2007, Scalise knows what life was like before Trump consumed Republican politics. He’s one of fewer than 25 GOP members, out of 220, who served during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Scalise was first elected to a top leadership post in 2014, as whip, which put him in charge during Trump’s first term of marshaling support for the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

He spent a lot of time early this year reminding everyone how difficult those lifts were. The Senate failed on its ACA repeal vote in July 2017 and then kept fiddling on the issue into the fall, and the House didn’t fully engage on the tax plan until the fall, passing the budget resolution in late October despite the opposition of 20 Republicans from wealthy states that opposed its handling of local-tax deductions.

The final vote on the nearly $2 trillion tax cut did not come until five days before Christmas 2017.

“We had a rocky start in 2017, and it really threw us off a few months. We literally burned the first few months of that supermajority not having a sync between Congress and President Trump,” Scalise recalled Tuesday.

Back then, House Republicans had more than 240 members, a luxury compared with today’s tally of 220, with Johnson able to spare just three votes from his side of the aisle to pass legislation with no Democratic support.

So Scalise fought hard against Republicans, particularly in the Senate, when they wanted to divide up Trump’s agenda into two bills that would use the parliamentary fast track known as reconciliation, allowing some budget measures to pass without clearing the Senate’s filibuster hurdle.

House Republicans have been so bitterly divided that at times they struggle to execute the most basic tasks, so it made no sense to bet on them passing two major bills with no margin for error.

Scalise believes that pushing the tax agenda faster will deliver benefits faster to voters — something Republicans failed at eight years ago because Trump’s approval ratings on the economy did not soar until well after the 2018 midterm elections.

“We never really got the economic benefits because it takes months for those economic benefits to kick in. By the time you get to the midterms, you really didn’t have the full bounce from the positive things that did happen,” he said.

This time around, financial markets have had a different reaction, panicked by how the massive legislation will add trillions to the swelling federal debt.

But Republicans have convinced themselves it will give an economic boost regardless. So Scalise visited Trump a year ago and began planning with committee chairmen about how to push through an agenda as quickly as possible if the GOP swept control of Congress.

“Let’s be ready for the moment,” he told Trump.

Close friends feel that Scalise is finally really comfortable and delivering results, after an almost biblical run of surviving the shooting, fighting McCarthy and others in internal feuds, and battling blood cancer.

“We can’t minimize the speaker’s role, we can’t minimize the whip’s role. But Steve Scalise is running on all cylinders in a big way,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Florida), a 22-year veteran and unofficial lieutenant on Team Scalise.

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Scalise said that he is in remission and that he goes through a battery of tests monthly. Sometimes he still crosses a partisan line that doesn’t fit his otherwise backslapping nature, as happened during a fiery, almost 20-minute speech just after 5 a.m. Thursday.

Scalise accused Democrats of saying “President Biden’s health is just fine,” a couple of days after the former president’s prostate cancer diagnosis.

It was a more partisan jab, coming from someone who’s also battling cancer, than Scalise’s natural posture.

When Pelosi delivered her farewell speech from leadership, in November 2022, Scalise was the only member of the GOP leadership to attend. He said that he loves the institution and was there out of respect, particularly after she had been so nice to him after the 2017 shooting.

Scalise blames “small numbers on both sides” who use a burn-it-all-down approach to toxify the image of Congress.

“It doesn’t take many people to do it. And that helps beat the institution down,” he said.

Scalise has been beat down more than most lawmakers, and he has the scars — real and emotional — to show for it.

But he keeps forging ahead.

Next month, at the annual Congressional Baseball Game, Scalise will again take the field at Nationals Park, where lawmakers gathered in a massive, bipartisan prayer the day after the 2017 shooting.

He expects to occupy the one spot in the baseball lineup that he has yet to secure inside the Capitol.

Scalise bats leadoff for the Republican team.

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