The House has left town for the week after Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), eight GOP colleagues and 213 House Democrats bested Speaker Mike Johnson on the floor Tuesday afternoon. Luna and her allies defeated a GOP leadership-drafted rule that sought to overturn an effort to install proxy voting for new mothers and fathers. Johnson will try again to stop Luna’s proxy-voting effort next week – with two new House Republicans from Florida elected Tuesday night. More on that here.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Budget Committee Republicans will meet today with President Donald Trump as the chamber prepares to vote on a compromise budget resolution later this week.
That it’s coming the same day Trump is unveiling his latest wave of tariffs — “Liberation Day,” as the president calls it — shows how vital Trump’s personal involvement is in every phase of reconciliation.
We have news: GOP leaders are considering giving the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee each around a $1.5 trillion ceiling for spending within their jurisdictions in the compromise budget resolution they’re working to finalize, though the number has been in flux. We scooped this last night. That would be alongside the current policy baseline, which would zero out the cost of extending about $3.8 trillion of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
The instructions aren’t final yet, but this would provide the tax committees a good amount of room to work with in order to cut taxes.
They’d need a few hundred billion dollars to extend a trio of business tax breaks that expired during the last few years, yet the instructions would still leave space for Trump’s tax-cut priorities or other additions tax writers want to make. Republicans have been planning to offset the cost of any new tax cuts, but they’re going for maximum flexibility here just in case things don’t go according to plan.
What’s unresolved. Senate Republicans are rolling the dice on Trump’s legislative agenda, putting off even more big decisions — and relying on Trump to help bail them out later.
Senate Republicans have made no secret about their desire to punt on addressing the most complicated — and consequential — elements of the budget reconciliation package.
First, it was on spending cuts. House and Senate Republicans haven’t yet agreed to the same final number on spending cuts, with the two sides hundreds of billions of dollars apart. Second, there are serious disagreements over potential reductions to Medicaid and other social safety net programs.
And on Tuesday, Thune signaled he’s adding another item to that list — a Senate parliamentarian ruling on whether Republicans can use the current policy baseline to satisfy their goal of making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.
Taken together, it’s a “survive-and-advance” strategy in keeping with Thune’s public and private messaging. Thune keeps pushing his GOP colleagues to embrace a basic budget resolution so they can get to work ASAP on the actual law-making phase of what the South Dakota Republican has deemed an “arduous” process. The specifics can wait for another day, Thune insists. Now is the time to show some progress.
Yet by telling Senate Republicans he doesn’t immediately need a parliamentarian ruling on a make-or-break tax policy question, Thune is taking a big risk on an issue that could come back to haunt Republicans later.
What Thune said: The majority leader signaled a strategic shift on Tuesday when, as we scooped, he told GOP senators that they don’t actually need to hear from the parliamentarian on the current policy baseline tactic. Senate Republicans had been saying for days that a parliamentarian ruling would reassure their House GOP counterparts about the path forward as well.
Instead, Thune declared that it’s actually Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who gets to set the baseline based on an interpretation of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. So when Democrats inevitably challenge this on the floor, Republicans can defeat the effort with just a simple majority vote.
It’s worth noting that Republicans haven’t completely ruled out the idea of getting a parliamentarian ruling before bringing up the compromise budget resolution, which they still plan on doing at the end of this week.
Yet by saying they could move forward without it, Thune was suggesting — and said as much during the lunch meeting — that he doesn’t yet have the 50 requisite votes for the budget resolution.
Perhaps more importantly, it raises the stakes even higher for the next, more complicated phase of reconciliation.
If the parliamentarian tells Republicans they can’t use the untested scoring tactic to zero-out the cost of making the Trump tax cuts permanent, or finds that tax-cut extensions under the baseline run afoul of Senate reconciliation rules, it would be a disaster for the GOP. They’d then have to find extra savings elsewhere in order to offset the higher cost of the tax cuts — after they’ve already adopted a budget resolution.
It could also put Thune in a truly unenviable position. Thune has already said he isn’t in favor of voting to overrule the parliamentarian, which he believes would amount to gutting the filibuster. This is a red line for Thune. But some GOP senators could very well push for this, as could Trump.
Text of the Senate’s budget resolution could come out as soon as today. In the meantime, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will be at Senate Republicans’ lunch this afternoon, as we scooped.
History in the Senate: Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) now holds the record for the longest-ever Senate floor speech. For 25 hours and five minutes, Booker held the floor in a bid to highlight what he said were Trump’s “reckless” actions on everything from DOGE to tariffs to foreign policy.
