Happy Monday morning. And happy Memorial Day. The House and Senate are gone this week and we only have AM editions.
If you’re Speaker Mike Johnson or any House Republican, this may sound a bit like nails dragging across a chalkboard.
Here’s what President Donald Trump said about potential changes to the House Republican reconciliation package on Sunday night:
“I want the Senate and the senators to make the changes they want. It will go back to the House and we’ll see if we can get them. In some cases, those changes may be something I’d agree with, to be honest. … I think they are going to have changes. Some will be minor, some will be fairly significant.”
Now just compare that to what Johnson has been saying.
In an interview after the bill passed Thursday, Johnson told us that he went to a Senate Republican lunch last week and “shared … from the heart about how difficult” it was to cobble together a package that could get 218 votes.
“If it wasn’t obvious for them, I wanted them to know the equilibrium that we reached is so delicate,” Johnson declared.
Johnson added: “My hope and my encouragement to them is – fine tune this product as little as possible.” He likened passing the bill in the House to “crossing over the Grand Canyon on a piece of dental floss.”
Therein lies the tension for Republicans during the next phase of the reconciliation process. Senate Republicans want changes to the House-approved bill, as Senate Majority Leader John Thune told us. Trump is now greenlighting that process. And House Republicans may end up left holding the bag.
If the GOP reconciliation package shifts too much to the right – more spending cuts and or big programmatic modifications to Medicaid and SNAP – support will bleed from the middle. If the Senate tempers the Medicaid spending cuts, conservatives will bolt.
The bill’s future is so uncertain that the SALT Caucus asked Johnson to agree to fight for the House’s state-and-local-tax-deduction cap in negotiations with the Senate. Yet Republican senators don’t really care much about SALT.
For now, Trump is leaving his preferences on everything pretty vague. We assume that will change once the Senate returns next week.
Trump’s comments, though, are music to the ears of some conservative hardliners in the Senate. They want to see spending cuts far deeper than the House approved. The House Freedom Caucus pushed for that, only to run into a buzzsaw of opposition from GOP moderates, who threatened to bring the bill down.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been on a rampage against the House package. RonJohn told us last week that he wasn’t worried about pressure from Trump, declaring “He can’t pressure me that way.
“I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging our children’s future,” RonJohn said.
On Sunday, RonJohn told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he had enough Senate GOP support to block the massive reconciliation bill.
“I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” RonJohn said, using language on Trump that you don’t usually hear from Republican senators.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said he’d oppose the package over the increase in the debt limit.
“I think the cuts currently in the bill are wimpy and anemic, but I still would support the bill, even with wimpy and anemia cuts, if they weren’t going to explode the debt,” Paul said on Fox News Sunday. “They’re going to explode the debt. The House’s [debt-limit increase] is $4 trillion. The Senate’s actually been talking about exploding the debt by $5 trillion.”
But Trump, who didn’t get everything he wanted in the House bill, may try to use the Senate to try to shoehorn in some of his priorities. For example, the House didn’t close the carried-interest loophole. It’s tough to see the Senate taking up that mantle, but Trump may try.
The House also didn’t create a new tax bracket for people earning $2.5 million or more annually, as Trump wanted. Plus, the House didn’t fully eliminate taxes on Social Security.
After the events of last week, Trump seems confident that he can swing any bloc of GOP votes in the House Republican Conference. The alternative is that nothing passes, which if you’re a Hill Republican – especially a House Republican – is an absolute disaster.
It’s literally the worst scenario imaginable. They’re already going to pay the political price in what’s shaping up to be a difficult midterm election for the razor-thin House GOP majority. May as well vote for something rather than nothing – as long as Senate Republican conservatives don’t go totally crazy. But that will be Thune’s problem.
Remember: It’s May 26. Johnson and Thune want this bill passed and on Trump’s desk by July 4. That’s 39 days from now.
