That was a major win for Speaker Mike Johnson.
The House’s dramatic passage of Republicans’ multi-trillion dollar budget resolution Tuesday evening marked the biggest victory of Johnson’s brief leadership career. It was the result of weeks of hard work and intense focus amid the chaos of President Donald Trump’s Washington. It also was a victory against a GOP-run Senate that was in direct conflict with him.
But make no mistake — Johnson couldn’t have done this without Trump. Less than two months ago, Johnson survived a cliffhanger speaker vote only because of Trump. Johnson can now lay the groundwork for major spending and tax cuts, but Trump will have to close the deal. It’ll be the same for Senate Majority Leader John Thune in the Senate.
Tuesday night’s House vote was dramatic. Johnson and the House GOP leaders held the floor open for an hour while corralling votes for the resolution. But lacking support to pass the measure, Johnson pulled the resolution and sent members home for the night, a seemingly embarrassing setback.
Yet just minutes later — Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer hadn’t even left the floor — House GOP leaders reversed course. They ordered the House back into session to vote on the budget proposal. Their gamble paid off.
The 217-215 vote saw every wavering Republican flip besides Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who spent all day saying he’d vote no, voted yes. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) voted yes after saying that she couldn’t support the measure.
Trump and Johnson tag-teamed this effort. Trump started making calls Monday to lobby undecided Republicans. In the final stretch, Trump and Johnson worked over Spartz together. Johnson flipped Davidson, who had questions about discretionary spending cuts.
The fallout. First, the battle lines are drawn for 2026. Everyone understands that House Republicans will try to extract huge savings from Medicaid, Pell Grants and SNAP to reach the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts they promised. In turn, Democrats will make these social safety net cuts the central part of their efforts to wrest back control of the House. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the DCCC will hang this vote — and future ones — around the neck of every vulnerable Republican.
Second, this now kicks off the most difficult part of the reconciliation process, a phase that will take several months to complete if GOP leaders and the White House are lucky.
Senate Republicans “will want to do some things with” the House’s plan, Thune said Tuesday night with a laugh as he left the Capitol. That’s putting it lightly.
Will the Senate agree to the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that the House outlined? How about the $4 trillion debt-limit hike? And what about the $4.5 trillion for tax cuts, which does not provide enough budgetary room to permanently extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts?
Here are four dynamics you should keep an eye on as Congress moves into the really difficult part of advancing Trump’s agenda.
1) Timing. Johnson and Thune need to find a compromise budget resolution that can eventually win the support of conservative House Republicans, who will oppose any attempts to scale back spending cuts.
That compromise budget resolution won’t come to the House floor until early April, most likely. That’s when two new House Republicans from Florida will be sworn in. (Although New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik can now exit for her U.N. gig.)
Johnson wants to send a reconciliation package to Trump by the early part of May. Thune told us Tuesday night that Johnson’s timeline is “possible” but noted that there are many more steps to go.
2) Medicaid. One of the critical fights will be over cuts to popular programs, especially Medicaid. In passing the budget resolution, House Republican leadership convinced wobbly moderates that the Senate would likely water down the hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts called for in the House’s plan.
The real challenge for the House GOP will be accepting that Senate Republicans don’t have an appetite for giant spending cuts.
3) Tax policy. Perhaps the most important demand of Senate Republicans is that the 2017 tax cuts be made permanent. This is Thune’s red line, as he made clear once again in his statement last night. The House’s budget plan doesn’t realistically allow for permanence. Thune also hinted that there could be changes to the $4 trillion debt-limit increase included in the House bill, a nod to some GOP senators’ opposition to using reconciliation for this purpose.
There’s openness on the House side to using the scoring method that Senate Republicans want to employ to make permanent extensions feasible without having to dip into huge offsets because of reconciliation rules.
But along with the tax instructions, there’s lots of policy to work out between the chambers. For one, Senate Republicans have far less of a reason to set a higher cap on deducting state and local taxes, a key demand for a handful of House Republicans from blue states.
This is news: Key Hill Republicans and Trump administration officials are huddling at the White House complex this afternoon to work on nailing down tax plans, with more meetings to come. The meeting is expected to include Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on the administration side. From the Hill, it’ll include Johnson and Thune along with the tax committee chairs, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).
4) Trump. The next few months will test Trump’s patience and discipline. Hill Republicans can’t pass a reconciliation package without the president staying engaged and taking cues from congressional leaders on where he could be helpful. Remember, in 2017, Trump nearly blew up the tax bill on several different occasions.
