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Senate and House Republicans largely agree they need to make President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. The rest of their budget talks are far from resolved.
The House’s Tuesday approval of its once-wobbly budget caught the Senate largely off-guard and teed up a series of perilous choices for the GOP — on preventing a government shutdown, avoiding a debt default, keeping Trump’s border policy funded and enacting his new tax cut ideas.
Republicans had few clear answers on Wednesday about how to handle those problems. Many of them were still digesting the House’s triumph over the Senate’s low expectations.
“I don’t think the Senate thought we could do it,” said Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, a member of party leadership.
The back-up plan was obvious if the House budget failed: The Senate would have tried to swiftly approve tens of billions of dollars in border security and defense money, cash that would counteract the cash-flow constraints of a possible shutdown or year-long stopgap bill.
Despite the House’s advancement of its all-in-one approach, some Senate GOP sources privately suspect they may need to keep their smaller budget blueprint in their back pockets given that top Trump officials have demanded more border money ASAP. Other Senate Republicans said their initial strategy is sidelined; “I would say it’s gone,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
No matter which camp is proven right, Republicans now have to do a ton of heavy lifting as they attempt to reconcile their competing budget frameworks while under pressure from a demanding president at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump alongside each chamber’s tax chairs on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the tax cuts and how to work together.
Johnson suggested afterward that Trump will announce “big decisions” they’d made and said the Senate will “move quickly and aggressively” to respond to the House.
In separate remarks, though, Thune made clear that government funding is the most urgent task before Washington: “We’ve got to deal with the March 14 deadline first, and then we’ve got to get work on the bigger project.”
And if the Senate ends up taking up the House’s budget, senators are already talking about making big changes to allow for permanent tax cuts, remove a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling and possibly even trim spending cuts. While most Republicans are aligned on the first change, there are some serious differences of opinion on the other two.
“It actually has some things even worse than ours,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said of the House’s framework after opposing the Senate’s plan last week. “I mean, a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling? I can’t imagine voting for that.”
Other Senate Republicans said they want the option to raise the debt ceiling through the party-line process known as budget reconciliation, which requires lawmakers to vote for a specific dollar amount rather than a suspension of the debt ceiling through a specific date.
“Everybody has something they like or don’t like,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont. “But there are merits to putting [a debt limit hike] into the reconciliation, and it’s something we should consider.”
Not to mention that the entire fight is running parallel to the shutdown deadline. House and Senate GOP spending chiefs also met with Thune and Johnson Wednesday morning, though they left the room with no resolution, according to Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine.
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Top House Republicans are warning against straying too far from what they barely approved on Tuesday night. They see that close call as proof of their leadership’s struggle to corral a stick-thin majority — and a reminder that Senate Republicans should follow their lead.
As Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., put it: “We’re the ones that can lose the fewest votes.”
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Senate Republicans on Wednesday, and Trump also affirmed, that the administration supports a call from Daines and other Finance Committee Republicans to make his tax cuts permanent. That will probably require the House to accept paying for less of the bill with spending cuts.
“I don’t think my House colleagues will be surprised” by that change, said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
Senate Republicans may be more sensitive to spending cuts than their House counterparts, particularly when it comes to likely cuts to Medicaid programs that serve many red-state voters. Yet Republican senators also understand that the House’s budget likely only passed because of those same proposed cuts, making it tough to win an intraparty fight to reverse them.
House Republicans are already insisting on adherence to the spending reductions they voted for. Conservative Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, on Wednesday called the House measure’s cuts “a floor” — and warned that “any additional tax reductions” must be tied to further cuts.
“They’re going to come back with basically no spending cuts, and that’s going to be a non-starter over here,” Hern said of the Senate.
Burgess and Eleanor’s View
Johnson clearly exceeded expectations by showing his chamber could move the outlines of a massive party-line bill that cuts taxes and government spending in massive amounts while spending on the border and national security.
Yet his projected optimism Wednesday evening belies the undeniable fact that the GOP has painful decisions to make before it can even start on the specifics of that bill. The imminent deadlines for government funding and the debt ceiling won’t make their next several weeks any easier.
Don’t be surprised, then, if it’s officially spring by the time the House and Senate can reconcile their competing budgets.
The View From The Senate’s Leadership Suites
Senate Republicans raced to finish their budget last week while the House was away from Washington, work that now appears it may be all for naught. Some of them insist it wasn’t in vain, saying the House was motivated by the cross-Capitol competition.
“What we’ve done here in the Senate spurred the House to act much more quickly,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the party whip.
Notable
- Johnson’s budget win, like his speaker race, was aided directly by Trump, according to the New York Times.