House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he has not yet locked down enough Republican support to advance his chamber’s budget resolution this week but is confident the holdouts will ultimately cooperate.
With his razor-thin majority, Mr. Johnson cannot afford more than one GOP defection if he wants to adopt the party’s budget resolution that is the first step in moving on President Trump’s legislative agenda.
Rep. Victoria Spartz, Indiana Republican, has said she is opposed to the current version of the budget. She is the only publicly declared “no” vote, but more members are griping privately.
“There may be more than one, but they’ll get there,” said Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican.
Speaking Monday afternoon at an event hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Mr. Johnson cracked jokes about his predicament and suggested he was starting “a prayer request” to get the budget over the finish line.
“I don’t think that anybody wants to be in front of this train,” he said. “They want to be on it.”
The budget resolution includes instructions to House committees asking them to craft a sweeping reconciliation package that will spend up to $300 billion over the next decade on border security, immigration enforcement and the national defense, to cut other spending by at least $1.5 trillion and to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion.
The budget also calls for sweeping tax cuts with a maximum net cost of $4.5 trillion.
Budget reconciliation is the process that Republicans are using to advance the party’s legislative agenda without the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The GOP is not likely to fix everything in one bill and one fell swoop, but can turn the tide, Mr. Johnson said.
“Then we will be able to hold this as a governing majority for years to come,” he said.
The Senate late last week adopted its own budget resolution that calls for splitting the president’s agenda into two reconciliation bills, with a first focused on border and defense funding and a second on the tax cuts.
Senate GOP leaders have referred to their budget as “plan B” in case the House can’t advance its own plan.
“That’s fine, but I said you have to allow the House to lead on this — by necessity,” Mr. Johnson said of his message to his counterparts in the other chamber. “We need to. We have to. I have the more complicated equation to solve.”
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.