House Republican leaders are calling on the Senate to take up their plan to quickly pass President Donald Trump’s agenda in “one big, beautiful bill.” It’s not likely to happen.
Both chambers of Congress came back from a weeklong recess today, and Republicans have some pressing business to attend to before another two-week break scheduled to begin on April 11. At or near the top of the list is merging their competing budget blueprints into a version that both the House and Senate can adopt — a crucial step toward enacting President Donald Trump’s agenda of tax cuts, border crackdowns and energy deregulation.
Tuesday marks one month since House Republicans passed their resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. The plan also included a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling.
That was a big step in the special process the GOP is using to pass President Donald Trump’s agenda and ensure that Senate Democrats can’t block the bill. But the Senate had passed its own, much narrower budget resolution days earlier, and that plan targets $342 billion in spending increases, including $175 billion for immigration enforcement operations and a $150 billion boost for defense, while leaving aside tax changes for a later bill.
Republicans in the House and Senate now need to come together on a final version of the budget framework. Key lawmakers from both sides and officials from the Trump administration are set to meet Tuesday toward that goal. Ahead of the meeting, Speaker Mike Johnson and other House Republican leaders suggested Monday that the Senate should just accept their plan.
“The House is determined to send the president one big, beautiful bill that secures our border, keeps taxes low for families and job creators, grows our economy, restores American energy dominance, brings back peace through strength, and makes government more efficient and more accountable to the American people,” Johnson and his team said. “We took the first step to accomplish that by passing a budget resolution weeks ago, and we look forward to the Senate joining us in this commitment to ensure we enact President Trump’s full agenda as quickly as possible.”
The statement went on to explicitly “encourage” Senate Republicans to take up the House plan. “This is our opportunity to deliver what will be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the history of our nation,” it said. “Working together, we will get it done.”
Johnson has set an ambitious timeline for enacting Trump’s legislative agenda and is aiming to have the House pass the final budget framework before the next recess. But the House bill faces resistance in the Senate on several fronts, including concerns about potential Medicaid cuts and other spending reductions as well as questions about what can really be passed by the Johnson’s razor-thin majority. Some House Republicans are reportedly looking for the Senate to revise the plan they approved and scale back the level of cuts. Republicans are also still uncertain about whether they can use a questionable accounting approach that would zero out the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. And they must decide how to deal with the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, which blue state Republicans insist must be raised.
Politico reports that “nearly every key decision remains unsettled.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has reportedly told his members that he wants to push through a budget resolution before the April recess but that the Senate isn’t likely to pass Trump’s agenda until July or later.
“Thune said he thought that the House’s timeline on this was totally unrealistic and that the House doesn’t have their ducks in a row, and their budget resolution has to be completely reworked, and this idea that we do it by April or May is just ridiculous,” one unnamed Republican senator told The Hill.
The bottom line: Republicans scored a victory this month by sticking together on a spending bill and forcing Democrats to make a difficult choice on a possible government shutdown. Now, with a three-week window to demonstrate some progress on Trump’s legislative agenda, the GOP’s cohesion faces another huge test.