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Years before Donald Trump remodeled the GOP, the Tea Party took its turn transforming the party. And now, at a critical juncture for Trump’s agenda, its heirs in Congress are weighing just how far to push it.
A handful of conservative senators are holding out — for now, at least — on supporting Republican leaders’ still-evolving budget, the next step to advance Trump’s tax cut plans. Those senators are demanding deeper spending cuts than their House counterparts and questioning why the GOP would add a debt ceiling increase that they’d have to pass without Democrats.
But a big unknown lingers over the endeavor: Are fiscal conservatives willing to vote no on the budget if they don’t get their way? It’s something the party’s right flank is plainly wrestling with.
“I have an obligation to do so, if it doesn’t get it right. I also have an obligation to make sure it gets right, to get to the point where I can vote for it,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told Semafor of the budget that’s expected in the Senate floor as soon as next week.
Lee added that “I don’t necessarily want to encourage us to go slower. I just want to make sure that we do it cautiously and that we get it right.”
It’s a critical moment for Republicans like Lee whose political careers took off in 2010 and 2012 as a rejection of the GOP’s old guard. Senior Republicans estimate that the number of senators uneasy with the budget talks could jeopardize the package or at least delay it further, though Senate Majority Leader John Thune and fellow leaders are moving to assuage those concerns.
In addition to Lee, Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are the most vocal in their calls for more spending cuts. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., an original member of the Tea Party Caucus during her time in the House, told Semafor she’s taking their position, too: “I can’t support the House level. There needs to be more cuts than that.”
Senate Republicans are discussing adding $500 billion to the House GOP’s $1.5 trillion floor for spending cuts, although their budget may end up slashing even more, according to multiple members.
Lummis said a group of Republicans is pushing for deeper cuts, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he’s among them — but another Republican senator told Semafor that going too far could alienate the party’s more moderate members. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who leans more populist, said he could support deeper cuts but not if they affect benefits to Medicare or Medicaid, which the House had proposed targeting.
Republicans can lose up to three votes from their side and pass the budget with a simple majority.
“We’re trying to thread the needle … all of us want to use as robust of a deficit reduction package as we can, but also something that we can get through the Senate,” Thune told Semafor.
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At the same time, Thune’s most fiscally conservative members are pushing to excise a debt ceiling increase that Trump wants, separating that issue from the tax cut push. Paul was the only Republican to oppose the party’s initial budget earlier this year; he told Semafor this is the moment for conservatives to get loud or get rolled.
“They need to be more verbal, and if they’re vocal now, I think we can remove it from the bill. If more people don’t stand up, they’re going to jam things at the end and put it on,” Paul said.
Republicans do not seem optimistic about winning his vote.
It all speaks to the uncertain status of extreme budget-cutters in the Republican Party. Once a dominant force, these days they’re used to being assured by leaders that later, not now, is the time for steep spending reduction.
Johnson said this time he doesn’t buy it, and that he wants Republicans to push spending back to pre-pandemic levels.
“They say, ‘this is the first step here, we can always do more,’” Johnson told Semafor. Unless the party cuts spending now, he said: “We’re not going to do more.”
Whatever cuts the GOP endorses, the details will be left to Senate committees to figure out. Thune’s leadership team is simply hoping to generate momentum for the stalled Republican agenda heading into next month’s recess.
The party is far behind its 2017 pace when it comes to unilateral action on Trump’s agenda, and leaders are aware that at some point they need to call a vote.
“We’re closing in on it,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., the No. 4 conference leader. She said the goal is to “agree to an aspirational number, or at least agree to a minimum, so we can just move forward. Because we want to capture the momentum.”
Burgess’s view
Budget resolutions are more of a party unity exercise than anything else. And for that reason, despite the hard line being drawn by the Senate’s most Tea Party-friendly members, it’s hard to imagine four or more Republicans actually tanking the budget.
Thune would be highly unlikely to bring any budget to the floor, of course, if he didn’t have adequate support.
But it’s certainly possible that things get delayed even further if conservatives keep balking. And that might not be such a bad thing, since some Republican senators still think they might need to split Trump’s agenda back into two separate bills at some point.
If the Senate does move forward, the House might entertain further changes to the budget. To avoid yet another round of voting after this one, Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson will need to reach a compromise ahead of time.
That’s a huge challenge.
Room for Disagreement
There are still plenty of optimists in the Senate GOP who see a comfortable landing spot for everyone.
“I think the consensus now is it’s going to be $2 trillion, floor … actually, it’ll help us with the fiscal conservatives in the House and certainly in the Senate,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.
He added that “the real meat of the discussion is the actual [party-line] reconciliation bill,” not the budget, and likened the moment to an easy trip down the slope: “I call this skiing the green runs. We’re going to get into the blue runs and black diamonds next.”
It’s undeniable that this phase of legislating is far easier than what’s to come: Identifying binding cuts to popular government programs. Many Republicans already have said they are uneasy with cutting Medicaid, for example.
Notable
- The parliamentarian is likely to rule soon on the GOP’s preferred strategy for permanent tax cuts, NBC reports.
- The House might not even move that quickly to respond to the Senate, according to Politico.