A Win for the Trump Agenda
But the road only gets harder from here.
For about 10 minutes on Tuesday, it seemed like House Republicans were headed for an embarrassing setback.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had scheduled a vote on passing a budget resolution, the first step in the reconciliation process that will allow Republicans to advance President Trump’s legislative agenda without being subject to the Senate filibuster.
But, at the last minute, Johnson canceled the vote: because of his razor-thin majority, he could only afford to lose one Republican defection, and there were several GOP members who were planning to vote “no.” It looked like House Republicans weren’t going to be able to advance the Trump agenda that night; they would have to keep negotiating.
Then, only a few minutes later, a new announcement came. After initially telling lawmakers that they were done for the day, Republican leaders called back their members. A breakthrough had been reached; the vote would be held after all.
“In my 15+ years covering Congress, I’ve never seen the leadership cancel a vote, send lawmakers home and then abruptly switch course and put the vote up,” veteran congressional reporter Jake Sherman wrote. “All within the course of about 10 minutes.”
In the end, the resolution advanced by the slimmest of margins: 217-215, without a single vote to spare. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a perpetual libertarian thorn in leadership’s side, was the lone Republican dissenter. Every Democrat voted against the measure, including Rep. Brittany Petterson (D-CO), who returned with her four-week-old, and Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA), who has been recovering from knee surgery complications. He traveled with an IV on the airplane and used a walker as he entered the House floor.
“Big First Step Win for Speaker Mike Johnson, and AMERICA,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this morning. Indeed, the vote was an impressive victory for Johnson, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat — with help from Trump, who once again proved his clout on Capitol Hill by making calls to the Republican holdouts, persuading them to flip their votes.
At the same time, this vote is better understood as the beginning of a long, hard road of negotiating, not the end of it. As Trump said, it is only a “First Step.”
To understand the difficulties to come, it helps to look at H.Con.Res.14, the resolution that was approved by the House yesterday.
If you click on it and scroll through its 58 pages, you’ll see that it isn’t written like other pieces of legislation you might have seen. Most bills passed by Congress are fairly specific: X dollars shall go to Y thing. Z action shall be illegal.
But the budget resolution — by design — is very vague. It’s supposed to be a blueprint for a longer process, just getting the ball rolling by etching out a general outline of how much money can be spent or cut in the reconciliation bill.
H.Con.Res.14 lays out four main elements that need to be included in the as-yet-written reconciliation package:
It should increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
It should cut taxes by $4.5 trillion over 10 years.
It should increase spending by $300 billion over 10 years.
It should cut spending by $1.5 to 2 trillion over 10 years.
Which specific line items should lawmakers cut or increase? The resolution doesn’t say. Instead, the measure is intended to serve as instructions to each House committee, giving them guidelines for filling in the details.
For example, here’s the section on the Homeland Security Committee, which is supposed to come up with $90 billion of the $300 billion in spending increases:
It doesn’t say specifically where that $90 billion will go to, but the Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over border security funding, and we know that it is one of the main priorities Republicans want to boost in the reconciliation package. So you can read the above as essentially instructions to Homeland Security Committee to draft a $90 billion plan to increase border security funding.
The Judiciary Committee, which also shares jurisdiction over border security, was also instructed to spend $110 billion. And the Armed Services Committee — which oversees defense spending — was told to raise spending by $100 billion. Add those up, and you land at $300 billion in increased spending.
Then, these committees were told to decrease spending by at least these amounts:
Energy and Commerce Committee (jurisdiction over health care and energy programs): $880 billion in cuts
Education and Workforce Committee (jurisdiction over education and labor programs): $330 billion in cuts
Agriculture Committee (jurisdiction over farmer assistance and food stamps): $230 billion in cuts
Oversight and Government Reform Committee (jurisdiction over the civil service, the District of Columbia, the Census, and the Postal Service): $50 billion in cuts
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (jurisdiction over highways, transit, and aviation): $10 billion in cuts
Financial Services Committee (jurisdiction over the banking industry and housing programs): $1 billion in cuts
Natural Resources Committee (jurisdiction over fisheries, wildlife, national parks, mining, and Native American lands): $1 billion in cuts
I’ve given you a rough idea of what each panel covers but, again, the specific programs that will be cut in the reconciliation package have yet to be determined. This is how, for example, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) can push back on Democratic allegations that the measure will cut Medicaid by saying: “The word Medicaid is not even in this bill. This bill doesn’t even mention the word Medicaid a single time.”
That’s true! But the resolution does say this:
And, no, that passage doesn’t mention Medicaid once. But, consider, as this New York Times graphic shows, what spending the Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over:
It’s almost all Medicare and Medicaid! And Republicans have already ruled out cutting Medicare, which provides health insurance to Americans over 65, as part of the reconciliation package. So, in order to make the $880 billion in spending cuts that the resolution requires, the Energy and Commerce Committee will have basically no other options besides cutting Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans.
That’s how the resolution effectively calls for Medicaid cuts without using the word “Medicaid” once.
As the reconciliation process continues, all these holes will be filled in, and what’s now incredibly vague (“Energy and Commerce Committee, find us $880 billion!”) will become searingly specific (“we will save money by imposing work requirements on certain Medicaid recipients”).
That’s why the process will only get harder from here. The resolution that passed last night is the haziest, most zoomed-out version of the reconciliation bill that Republicans will ever be asked to vote on — and, even still, many of them only signed on after considerable arm-twisting. From here on out, the details of the legislation will only get clearer, which means any members who were hesitant at the first stage could grow to become fierce critics if they don’t like the specifics.
It’s easy(-ish) to vote for a broad outline. It’s a much bigger ask to vote for something binding. And, as you may recall, Speaker Johnson has almost no margin of error to work with.
The resolution that passed last night is what’s known as a “concurrent resolution” (hence its name, H.Con.Res.14), which means the next step in the process is for it to pass the Senate as well. The upper chamber has to pass the exact same resolution that the House passed, or the reconciliation process can’t begin.
This might take some arm-twisting, too. As I’ve covered previously, Senate Republicans have a very different idea of how to advance the Trump agenda: they want to pass the border security and defense spending first, and then cut taxes in a separate package, rather than doing it all in “one big beautiful bill,” as the House prefers.
Trump had appeared to endorse the House approach last week, paving the way for yesterday’s vote. But the president still seems to be vacillating, giving senators hope that he may yet support their plan. “So the House has a bill and the Senate has a bill, and I’m looking at them both, and I’ll make decisions,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, even though most in Washington thought the decision had already been made. “I know the Senate is doing very well and the House is doing very well. But each one of them has things that I like. So we’ll see if we can come together.”
It’s hard to know how to take that, but it probably means that the GOP will continue pushing forward with one bill, but that senators might make changes to the budget resolution — which would require another tough House vote, on the amended version. Once they agree on the outline, the work of actually crafting the reconciliation package will begin.
“Coming together” on both of these measures — the resolution and the package itself — will be no easy task, considering the sheer number of issues in the bill that Republicans are divided on:
Medicaid. Several moderate members only voted for the resolution last night because they were assured that the Medicaid cuts will end up totaling less than $880 billion. But many conservative members only voted for the measure because it cut that much. That will be a hard circle to square — especially when you add in the fact that Trump appears skeptical of any Medicaid cuts in the first place, with some of his populist allies (see Bannon, Steve) warning against slashing the program.
Tax cuts. Trump has laid out his tax priorities for the package: extending his 2017 tax cuts, lifting the salt and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, and cutting taxes on tips, overtime pay, Social Security benefits, and domestic production. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, at best — depending on how those cuts are structured — those priorities alone would cost $5 trillion, more than the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts allotted in the budget resolution. At worst, they could cost up to $11.2 trillion. It’s possible that the president won’t get everything he’s asking for. Then, add in the fact that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has demanded that the reconciliation package make the 2017 tax cuts permanent (something Trump endorsed this morning), not just extending them by 10 years, as the House has been planning. Making the tax cuts permanent would definitely cost more than $4.5 trillion. Ruh-roh.
Debt ceiling. Dozens of House conservatives have never voted to increase the debt ceiling, always counting on it being done by a bipartisan bill that would pass with Democratic support. Now, Republicans are trying to increase the debt limit singlehandedly; everyone but Massie provisionally agreed to do so in the budget resolution yesterday, but actually voting to raise the debt limit in the eventual reconciliation bill could be another matter. There are many fiscal hawks who will only accept the debt ceiling hike if they are satisfied by the level of spending cuts in the final bill. Already, this is proving to be an issue. “Now let’s start to BALANCE THE BUDGET,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post this morning — but the House resolution would cut spending by $2 trillion, while cutting taxes and raising spending by a combined $4.8 trillion, punching a $2.8 trillion hole in the deficit. The GOP resolution itself lays out the next 10 years of projected deficits under their plan. A “balanced budget” would mean having no deficit, a far way off from the $2 trillion+ deficits Republicans themselves project. Freedom Caucus members won’t like to see that.
Republicans may have scored an important victory last night, but they have a lot more to hash out before they can start celebrating.
An excellent, detailed report. Thank you.
Good work Gabe. Keep going.