After the passage of the House of Representatives’ budget resolution on Tuesday, GOP lawmakers face a major challenge: Getting Senate Republicans to sign off on the plan without making too many changes so as to make it impossible to pass when it comes back to the House.
This complicated game of legislative sudoku will require Republican congressional leadership to get every faction of the GOP to align: budget hawks, defense hawks, tax-cut advocates, blue state Republicans, and pro-entitlement program representatives.
Many Republicans in the Senate are concerned that the House plan does not provide the money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promises while avoiding either gutting entitlement programs or sending the nation even further into debt—two politically undesirable outcomes.
Should negotiations fail, the administration’s legislative agenda would be put in jeopardy.
The House budget resolution is essentially a plan to cut $2 trillion in spending and provide $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years.
“We demonstrated last night how delicate the balance here is,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday after narrowly passing the resolution. “If you change too many of the terms, it’s going to be very difficult to pass on the House side.”
A group of Republicans in the House initially said they would vote against it, arguing that cuts were too small. Johnson was able to wrangle in most of them, with just one Republican lawmaker in opposition at the end of the roll call.
Now, Johnson’s plan will once more go through the gauntlet as Republicans negotiate how to alter the resolution.
According to CNN’S Manu Raju, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Wednesday that she was concerned the cuts were too deep.
“If we see the kinds of cuts that are being floated over on the House right now, could be devastating to Alaska,” said Murkowski.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has already signaled his concerns that the plan would cut into entitlement programs—a red line for him.
“I don’t like the idea of massive Medicaid cuts. We should have no Medicare cuts of any kind,” Hawley told the Huffington Post.
So far, the majority of Republican senators who have spoken on the issue have chosen to emphasize their main priorities in the budget process, rather than outline an exact plan to iron out differences.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told The Daily Signal in a statement that she was focused “on the results, not the process.”
“The goal is to give President Trump the resources he needs to turn promises made into more promises kept,” she said, adding that she was focused on border security and economic relief through tax cuts.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also seeing the budget negotiations as an important opportunity to make legislation possible, told The Daily Signal, “I have multiple critical priorities for reconciliation,” and went on to list winning the race for 6G cellular connection, no taxes on tips, defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and advancing school choice legislation.
For Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent might be the highest priority.
“Look, this is the most important thing we can do to ensure the economy keeps growing, wages keep growing, ensure that America remains globally competitive, is to make the Trump tax cuts from 2017 permanent,” Daines said on Fox.
But the tug-of-war in the Senate is not a one-sided issue of simply lessening cuts in the resolution. If leadership can’t persuade Congress that real cuts are being made, it could make passing a resolution difficult.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., for example, has already called the spending cuts in the House plan “completely inadequate,” and is calling for a more fiscally conservative plan.
Now, the real work begins.
Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R.-S.D., are tasked with uniting the GOP’s narrow, yet diverse majorities in the House and Senate behind one program.