News: Speaker Mike Johnson will go to the White House with a group of House Republicans today to meet with President Donald Trump about the budget resolution.
It’s not even five weeks into the 119th Congress and the White House and Senate Republicans are already growing tired of waiting for House Republicans to get their act together.
How do you think the Republican trifecta is doing?
The House and the Senate, both controlled by Republicans for the first time in six years, find themselves at loggerheads on the most important issue facing Congress this year — the future of Trump’s legislative agenda.
As Johnson and the House Republican Conference search for common ground between unyielding conservative hardliners and everyone else, the Senate has gotten tired of waiting.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he’s going to mark up his own $300 billion budget resolution next week, throwing a massive wrench into Johnson’s plans. Graham announced the budget-resolution markup as Johnson insisted that the House needs to move first.
The Senate’s budget plan won’t look at all like what the House is envisioning. Graham’s proposal would include $150 billion for the Pentagon and other defense programs, plus $150 billion for border security, including Trump’s border wall. There’ll also be energy policy provisions. Graham says the new spending will be offset by cuts to mandatory programs, but he didn’t say which ones.
Graham and Senate Majority Leader John Thune want to hand Trump an early win on the border, defense spending and energy policy — something the president might find attractive. Senate GOP leaders plan to return to extension of the 2017 tax cuts later this year with a second reconciliation package. If the Senate passes its budget resolution before the House moves, it would put the Senate in the driver’s seat in dictating the legislative contours of the 119th Congress.
Meanwhile, Johnson, House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) want a single reconciliation package that includes the totality of Trump’s agenda, everything from border security to energy to tax cuts. House Republicans think one bill is easier to pass than two.
Graham’s gamble — and it is one — may not make it through the House. Graham and Thune admitted as much during the Senate GOP lunch Wednesday, according to multiple Republican senators who attended the session. Yet Graham and Thune insisted that something had to be done, adding that they had little faith in Johnson or House GOP leaders.
This Senate drama shows how badly Johnson is getting squeezed on every side, just weeks after he barely survived a vote to be speaker. And that was only because of Trump’s direct intervention.
Conservative hardliners spoke up in a closed party meeting Wednesday, telling Johnson that they want two reconciliation bills, not one. A number of conservative hardliners — Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and others — are backchanneling with Senate Republicans to urge them to spoil the speaker’s plans.
So far, Trump has deferred to Johnson’s one-bill strategy. But the president has left the door open to the idea that two bills may be easier. And there are White House aides who privately agree with Graham, not Johnson.
Today’s White House meeting is a risk for Johnson, as hardliners will undoubtedly use the opportunity to make their case to Trump that the speaker’s strategy is terribly misguided.
This disagreement between House and Senate Republicans is getting heated. Smith, who last Congress passed a tax bill that was ignored by the Senate, has said Graham is wasting his time on a process that won’t go anywhere.
There are also very important policy implications to this clash.
The two-bill approach basically punts tax reform to the second half of 2025. Given the volatile nature of the House, it seems plausible that Republicans have just one chance to get something big through the chamber. In other words, the two-bill approach dramatically raises the chances that Congress will still be working on extending the 2017 cuts late into the fall.
There are other impacts as well. Government funding runs out on March 14. Democrats — increasingly dismayed by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative — are taking a harder line on FY2025 spending bills. And House and Senate Republicans still can’t agree among themselves on what the topline spending figure for next year should be.
A reconciliation package that includes defense and border security funding could potentially take some pressure off appropriators. Funding approved in that package doesn’t have to be included in an FY2025 spending deal. So it’s a safety valve in this scenario, some lawmakers have suggested to us. Yet Democrats may be so upset by the offsets Republicans chose to cover the cost of the package that can’t make a government-funding deal.
A California-related disaster aid package still has to be drafted and passed. And then there’s the real pressure point — raising the debt limit. There’s no way House and Senate GOP leaders can do this without Democratic votes. But what can they offer Democrats except more funding for social programs, which is exactly what hardline conservatives are trying to cut? Trump won’t want any problems here, however.
House and Senate Democratic leaders are coming under increasing pressure from their own rank-and-file lawmakers to take a tougher line with Trump and Republicans as well. That internal Democratic pressure is only going to ratchet up in the coming months, making compromise everywhere harder to achieve.
