Republicans could give themselves a chance to avoid some of the characteristic mistakes of the last several presidencies.

Politico reported on Saturday that Speaker Johnson has told House Republicans that Donald Trump now wants to pursue just one reconciliation bill this coming year rather than two. If that’s true (and secondhand reports of Trump’s opinions aren’t always borne out), it is a smart move. A one-bill strategy would recognize that last year’s election was very close and not the landslide Republicans have been spinning up in their imaginations, that Republicans lost seats in the House, and that if they’re going to achieve anything legislatively, they need to take account of the very challenging constraints they confront.

Those constraints have been hard to ignore in recent weeks, as House Republicans struggled to pass a continuing resolution in December and then to elect a speaker last week. On December 19, when Speaker Johnson’s original strategy for passing the CR failed, I noted the following  around here:

Even early yesterday, when it seemed like Speaker Johnson’s CR would make it, the process by which it had taken shape offered some serious red flags about the strategy Republicans have in mind for next year. But the way it got derailed should turn those red flags into blaring sirens and at the very least should cause some rethinking of the two-reconciliation-bill strategy that is the goal for early next year at this point.

Evidently, other people heard those sirens, too, and that’s good news for Republicans.

The appeal of reconciliation bills, in general, is that they can’t be filibustered in the Senate. Therefore, they afford an opportunity for party-line legislation even with a narrow majority in that body. The appeal of trying for two reconciliation bills in one year had to do, above all, with momentum. It would let the new president get started quickly by passing a party-line bill, in this case, a bill to fund immigration enforcement, which is a high priority for Republicans.

But there’s a reason why this kind of strategy usually fails — and why it has failed at the outset of both of the last two presidencies, in 2017 and 2021. It requires quick, tight, partisan maneuvering, and that, in turn, requires a lot of party cohesion. Maneuvers like that are very hard to pull off with narrow majorities, and Republicans now have a narrower House majority than they did in 2017 and even a narrower one than the Democrats had in 2021.

Such a narrow majority argues, first and foremost, for looking for opportunities to advance your agenda with bipartisan bills rather than partisan ones. But in the absence of the will to do that, it requires incentivizing party loyalty and raising the stakes of breaking with the party by piling priorities together rather than breaking them apart.

In this case, that would mean combining immigration enforcement money (which is a high priority for one major faction of congressional Republicans) with tax reform (which is a high priority for another major faction). Many members are in both factions, of course, but some are in only one, and just about every single member will have the power to kill party-line bills. So the priorities of the different factions have to be combined. Otherwise, you run a very real risk of both bills failing and an even higher risk of just the second bill — the tax bill — failing.

There is a cost to pursuing a single, more comprehensive bill, however. It will slow things down a lot. Republicans probably can’t get a tax bill together before the summer, so they won’t be able to advance any major legislation for the first six months of the new Congress. Momentum goes both ways, and starting out the second Trump presidency with a long stretch of inaction while messy negotiations happen in the background rather than a quick blizzard of successful enactments is a serious risk. The administration will surely try to overcome that problem by advancing a rush of administrative actions early on. The first few weeks will feel energetic and significant. But they will run out of long-prepared administrative actions fairly quickly, and after those further administrative action will be slow too — since real rulemaking (even if its purpose is deregulation) has to follow arduous procedures and takes many months.

Republicans were not wrong to want to avoid getting bogged down at the beginning of this year, but they were probably wrong to think they could avoid it. Seeing that before they try and fail rather than after is a good sign.

A one-bill strategy is still a gamble. Tax reform won’t be easy, and they have no margin for error in the House, where Republican tax priorities are more diverse than they sometimes seem — for reasons of political geography as well as ideology. If they can’t overcome those differences, even with the added leverage of broadly popular immigration-enforcement funding, they run the risk of getting zero reconciliation bills. But this strategy does make a party-line tax bill much more likely to happen.

And it also suggests that House Republican leaders have gotten the incoming administration to recognize the constraints under which they’re operating. Those constraints will have a very significant effect on what Trump’s second presidency can achieve. By recognizing the fact that this election extended rather than breaking the 50–50 pattern of our 21st-century politics, Republicans could give themselves a chance to avoid some of the characteristic mistakes of the last several presidencies. We will see if that recognition extends beyond this particular narrow question of how many reconciliation bills to pursue.