President Donald Trump showed again on Wednesday that he’s the answer to pretty much every problem for Hill Republican leaders — and that it’ll take a whole lot to stir up any resistance to his will.
First, Trump helped unlock Senate GOP votes for a compromise budget resolution designed to kick-start his legislative agenda. Trump then unveiled broad tariffs against dozens of U.S. trading partners — including key allies — with little real pushback from the party.
Tariffs. Just a few hours after Trump’s Rose Garden announcement, the Senate — with the help of four Republicans — narrowly voted to terminate Trump’s declaration of a national emergency for fentanyl trafficking, which he’s using to justify 25% tariffs on Canadian imports.
But the measure isn’t going anywhere in the House, where GOP leaders have prohibited such disapproval resolutions from even getting floor time. Plus, the four Republicans who backed it — Sens. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — are among the few willing to buck Trump on anything.
More importantly, the overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans — from the leadership down to rank-and-file senators who have made no secret of their unease with Trump’s tariff posture — voted with the president. That’s despite the wave of economic uncertainty Trump’s tariff policies have unleashed.
Equity futures are down between 2% and 3% today on Trump’s tariff announcement. He’s causing a major economic and political challenge for the GOP. And Republicans are mostly silent.
“What I want to do is see if we’re going after some jurisdictions where we have relatively fair balance of trade — it’s like, why are we doing that to begin with? That’ll be the first thing I’ll be looking to see,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said before Trump’s announcement.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has talked openly about his reservations with across-the-board tariffs like the ones Trump unveiled Wednesday. But Thune argued on the Senate floor that backing the resolution would harm efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking.
The bottom line: Rebuking Trump on tariffs could backfire given how much GOP leaders need him for budget reconciliation.
The budget resolution. On Tuesday, Thune indicated that he didn’t yet have the votes for a compromise budget resolution. The biggest problem was the group of hardline deficit hawks who weren’t sold on the lower spending-cut number outlined in the Senate’s instructions, designed to ensure flexibility. Senate and House Republicans are hundreds of billions of dollars apart on proposed spending cuts.
But a meeting with Trump on Wednesday morning, which Thune also attended, changed everything.
Suddenly, deficit hawks were warming to the plan. Thune and other Republicans attributed the difference to Trump.
“The meeting at the White House helped a lot. A lot of reassurances that we’re serious about deficit reduction as a part of this process,” Thune said in an interview.
During that session, Republicans told Trump he’ll need to play a very active role to get the package across the finish line, per attendees. Trump responded by saying he’d make a public statement to reassure skeptical conservatives over spending cuts.
“I was pleased with the commitment we got from the president,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) responded when asked if he’d back the budget resolution.
The group also requested that Trump send Congress a rescissions package to codify Elon Musk’s proposed spending cuts.
Here’s Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.):
”We asked him for his commitment… to defend our efforts to reduce spending and to do that publicly and vociferously. And I asked him, point blank, and he said he would. After the meeting, Chief [Susie] Wiles came to me and Thune and others, and said, ‘Help us draft the statement to the public.’”
Trump followed through. During his tariff announcement, Trump threw his “complete and total support” behind the compromise budget resolution, saying he’d work to get federal spending back to “where it should be.” Trump backed up his endorsement in a post Wednesday night.
So the release of legislative text on Wednesday was a sign not only of GOP leaders’ eagerness to show progress on Trump’s agenda, but also a clear signal that they have the votes to pass it.
The Senate is expected to take an initial procedural vote today, with a vote-a-rama likely to begin Friday evening. That puts final passage at some time early Saturday morning. House Republicans hope to take up the measure next week, pending how their rank-and-file members react to the text. The House GOP leadership also needs to solve its impasse over proxy voting.
Let’s talk taxes. Senate Republicans are plowing ahead using an untested scorekeeping method to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent.
GOP leaders added the “current policy baseline” to the budget resolution, which zeroes out about $3.8 trillion of the cost of those tax-cut extensions. That would mean Republicans can avoid needing huge offsets to pay for permanence.
Here’s what Speaker Mike Johnson said on this:
“We’re in the consensus-building business here… So we’ll have to socialize this with our members and see. Look, I think there’s a large number of House Republicans who expected that would be the final outcome… so it’s not a big surprise.”
News: Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso will talk about the need to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent on the floor today.
“By making the tax cuts permanent, businesses and families will get the stability and certainty they need to thrive,” Barrasso will say, per planned remarks. “Ninety percent of Americans saw their taxes go down because of tax reform. It would be disastrous for tax-and-spend Senate Democrats to choke off the chance for Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money.”
