When it comes to Republicans’ next megabill, the House’s most powerful appropriator, Tom Cole, said it best to me the other day: “Wanting ain’t getting.”
Even as Congress abandoned plans to pass an immigration-spending package before Memorial Day, as Republicans revolted against the Trump administration’s pursuit of a $1.776 billion settlement fund for his allies, key House Republicans were discussing a sprint toward a third bill under the so-called budget reconciliation process that would advance by the end of next month.
Passing three partisan reconciliation bills—the first was President Donald Trump’s tax cuts package—would be a feat that neither party has accomplished since the Nixon-era budget laws that created the process.
It’s a tantalizing tool for a party trying to defend majorities in the House and Senate while the high cost of living dominates voters’ economic anxieties.
But just because House Speaker Mike Johnson and top deputies have been huddling for weeks to find a constellation of policies that could get near-universal support, that doesn’t mean anything will become law, even with passage being completely within Republicans’ control.
For starters, Republicans can only lose two votes on any given day with full attendance to pass anything without Democratic votes.
But the reality goes far beyond that.
The kinds of policies that help incumbent Republicans fend off primary challengers in heavily red districts don’t necessarily work with the general electorate in the purple ones, and vice versa. Deep cuts to social services could make headroom for what couldn’t fit within the deficit caps last year, but at a political cost that lawmakers may not be willing to bear. Enacting or even passing that bill out of one chamber before the August recess may give Republican campaigns enough time to sell to voters that they’ve taken action on whatever’s included, though Democrats would have their fair share of criticism that would be hitting screens and mailboxes as well.
Absent a fiscal cliff like Republicans had hanging over their heads last year, it’s hard to get members to agree to acquiesce to the parts of the bill they don’t like.
And speaking of the August recess, there are realities of a legislative calendar truncated by the elections themselves.
Lawmakers are scheduled to be out for all of August and October to campaign. That leaves only September, and that time is usually dominated by preventing (or fighting about) a looming government shutdown at the end of the fiscal year.
There’s still the lame-duck session of Congress after the midterms, where Republicans would still control the legislative process for two months no matter the election outcome. But members may not be as keen to show up if they’ve lost reelection bids and are on the job hunt.
Of course, all of this barely considers the Senate, which would need to take any bill from the House and pass it through its own 53-seat Republican majority now riddled with defections by moderates and incumbents retired or seriously threatened by Trump-backed challengers in primaries.
Tweaking bills that couldn’t make it through Senate prohibitions on the inclusion of non-budgetary items in such a package is also a laborious process. Trump’s calls to fire the the chamber parliamentarian to negate those worries have caused senators to bristle at interference in their own rules and personnel hires.
And senators — who on average are eligible to take early retirement with Social Security benefits — would have to endure another physically taxing overnight vote-a-rama.
You can take at their word that there are corners of the Republican conference that fear what the ballooning national debt—roughly the size of the US’s gross domestic product—will do to the country’s ability to pay for the rest of its expenses that are crowded out by interest on bond payments, risking a potential catastrophic default on the national debt.
But addressing the deficit has always been seen as an issue that requires bipartisan support.
It’s difficult to find about $2 trillion in savings annually without considering both spending cuts and tax increases, which neither party has the political fortitude (or support) to shoulder alone.
So Republicans are trying to tackle the most intractable problems of our day with the narrowest of majorities.
Emphasis on “trying.”