The House of Representatives has already gotten to work passing legislation for President-elect Donald Trump to sign. In a rules package approved last Friday, House Republicans fast-tracked 12 bills that passed the House in the previous session of Congress. On Tuesday, the House approved its first bill in 2025, the Laken Riley Act, which would require federal immigration authorities to detain illegal immigrants found guilty of theft-related crimes.

The rule provision essentially allows the Republican majority to save their progress on the most important bills they managed to pass last session. The rules package also allows the designated bills to bypass the Rules Committee and go straight to the House floor, where they are protected bills from most objections, and where debate is limited to one hour.

“Ordinarily, in order to bring a bill to the floor under what’s called ‘regular order,’ it has to go through the Rules Committee,” explained House Republican Conference Secretary Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) on “Washington Watch” Monday. “When we passed the rules package, we included bills that we already passed in the last Congress … because … we don’t want to have to spend a lot of committee time that’s unnecessary in the Rules Committee to bring these bills to the floor.”

Republicans return with an even slimmer majority, currently consisting of two votes, leaving little room for error in crafting bills and whipping votes.

By including these dozen bills in the rules package, House Republicans avoided another mechanism for expediting bills by suspending the rules, which requires bills to receive a two-thirds majority to pass. “We don’t want to have to bring those bills on suspension,” Houchin said. This way, “we don’t have to have a two-thirds majority to pass them. They can pass with a simple majority.

“We are excited to hit the ground running to get to work as soon as possible,” she added. “We do expect that we’ll begin to pass some of these bills very quickly.”

By a bare majority of the House, congressional Republicans re-elected Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House Speaker on the first ballot, after Johnson (with an assist from Trump) convinced two out of three holdouts to switch their votes. “He’s a principled conservative who’s … had a tough job, and he’s done well, an admirable job in performing as Speaker,” said Houchin. “He’ll be spearheading, along with Leader [Steve] Scalise [R-La.], the rest of our agenda, which includes border security, restoring this economy, unleashing American energy, and just getting us back to American prosperity, putting parents back in charge of education, getting rid of some of these woke policies.”

According to House rules, a speaker must be selected before the House can proceed to any other business. It took the previous Congress 15 separate votes to settle on former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House Speaker, delaying their other work by several days.

This time, the swift agreement on Johnson allowed the House to adopt a rules package on the very same day (Friday). Congress again assembled on Monday, January 6 — amid a rare D.C. snowstorm — to fulfill their constitutional obligation to count the Electoral College votes.

On Tuesday, January 7, the House had already passed the first of its 12 fast-tracked bills. The Laken Riley Act passed by a vote of 264 to 159, with 48 Democrats joining all Republicans in approving the measure.

President-elect Trump will once again take the oath of office on January 20, giving Republicans control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, and allowing them to pass legislation endorsed by Trump without fear of a veto. “January 20th can’t come soon enough. We’ve already seen Joe Biden issuing additional executive orders on his way out of the office,” Houchin stated.

“Republicans are looking forward to that day, but they won’t be sitting on their hands until Inauguration Day,” observed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. At least in the House, Republicans are already working legislatively to enact President-elect Trump’s agenda.