We’re still in the early phase of Hill Republicans’ attempt to pass President Donald Trump’s agenda. Yet it’s fair to say, at this moment, things aren’t going well.
Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.
The House Budget Committee, which was supposed to mark up a budget resolution this week, hasn’t announced any meeting. The conservative hardliners are seemingly unmoveable. As we’ve been reporting all week, the House GOP leadership’s plan is stalled while Senate Republicans are anxious to possibly take over.
We wanted to lay out several scenarios spelling out how House Republicans might jumpstart their reconciliation process, based on conversations with senior aides and lawmakers.
Stay the course — and pull a rabbit out of the hat. Johnson is an optimist. You gotta give him that. The Louisiana Republican has maintained that the mess that we’re seeing right now is all part of what he calls the “deliberative process.” Fair enough. There’s certainly a lot of deliberating going on.
But there’s a path — a narrow path — for House Republicans to get a budget resolution allowing “one big beautiful bill” to move forward.
Following a very long meeting in the speaker’s office Tuesday night that included GOP leadership, committee chairs and some of the hardliners, there were signs of progress, although no agreement yet.
“I think when you look at where we are, we’re close to a trillion [dollars in cuts] and still working,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters afterward.
Scalise added that House GOP leaders “are focused on” trying to mark up a budget resolution next week.
They’ve also directed all the committees involved in this process to come up with more spending cuts. “We’re working on details for each committee,” Scalise said. “But we have gone back to each committee to increase those numbers. We’re not done on it.”
Plus, Republicans will think expansively about how to count savings — DOGE, projected 3% economic growth and a juiced economy from slashing regulations.
Then there’s Trump.
Can Trump, who has had limited legislative success during his first term, get Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) to back Johnson’s plan? Trump hasn’t yet leaned on lawmakers to get the reconciliation process going. By next week, he may have to.
Switch to two bills. Hold onto your hat, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.). There are House Republicans talking about the Budget Committee switching course and marking up the dual-track reconciliation process that Smith, the Ways and Means Committee chair, has railed against for months.
Trump says he doesn’t care if there’s one bill or two bills as long as his agenda gets approved. There are plenty of senior aides in the White House who want two bills. And the House Freedom Caucus wants two also.
The first reconciliation package would have defense spending, energy policy and border security provisions. The second reconciliation package — the tax-cut portion — would be punted until later. When exactly is unclear.
Smith doesn’t like the two-bill approach. In his view, that puts tax cuts at risk. Yet if the Budget Committee remains stuck, House Republicans may not have a choice.
Chip Roy, the floor is yours. There’s always an inclination in House Republican leadership to say something like this: “OK, Freedom Caucus. If you think your idea is so great, give it a shot, and let’s see how it goes.”
Play this out with us for a moment. What if Johnson tells Roy, Norman and the other conservative holdouts that they should write whatever budget resolution they want, try to push it through the Budget Committee and the full House, and then see what the Senate will do with it?
Of course, a Freedom Caucus-favored package may not get through the Budget Committee. If it does, it could fail on the House floor. And it will certainly get ripped to shreds in the Senate.
But there’s utility in that exercise to show that hardliners need to drop their draconian spending-cut demands and embrace a bill that can actually become law. That’s the real goal of legislating, right?
Next batter, Lindsey Graham. If you spend a few minutes in the Senate, you’ll get the sense that Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and his colleagues are ready to move their own budget resolution. Of course, their approach will look far different from what House Republican leaders would draw up. It would be a two-bill play.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s team would put this together, get it through their chamber and jam House Republicans. In fact, getting jammed by the Senate is a familiar feeling for the House GOP.
Failure. Consider this: Republicans split reconciliation into two pieces. The first bill — defense, border and energy — passes and gets signed into law. But Smith ends up being right and it gets too complicated to move a large-scale tax cut package. Then Republicans and Democrats would have to work toward the end of this year to try to pass a bipartisan extension of the 2017 rates.
With a GOP trifecta controlling Washington, that would be a suboptimal result for Republicans, to say the least.