WASHINGTON—House and Senate Republicans have initiated dueling plans to implement President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, and it is unclear which strategy will prevail.
The word “reconciliation” has dominated the agenda on Capitol Hill since the beginning of the year. It refers to the “budget reconciliation” process, which is a special procedure that Republicans want to use to fund the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and border wall construction, as well as extend certain tax cuts.
Unlike the normal process of passing a bill, reconciliation bypasses the Senate “filibuster” process, meaning that only a simple majority is required for passage in the upper chamber.
Reconciliation requires both the Senate and House of Representatives to concurrently pass a “budget resolution” for the fiscal year, which would instruct other committees to recommend new spending, as well as cuts, for the final bill.
As usual, the resolution approved by both houses must be completely identical. Any disagreement between them on the substance would break down the process.
Currently, such disagreement is the case. Whereas the Senate seeks to pass two reconciliation bills for this fiscal year, Republicans in the House want only one bill.
Each position reflects the politics of that house—in the Senate, Republicans believe that passing two bills would allow less controversial issues of border security to be addressed first, while more difficult questions of taxation and the sovereign debt limit could be addressed later.
By contrast, in the House, disagreements within the Republican conference—between fiscal conservatives and everyone else—have led Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to opine that they can maintain a coalition only for the passage of one bill.
“Nothing would please me more than one, big, beautiful bill. ... That is my preference. Now, what guides my thinking is the problem we have now: We’re running out of money,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is sponsoring the budget resolution in that body, said at a news conference on Feb. 11.
He described the two-bill approach as being because of urgency.
The Senate seeks to pass a first bill that authorizes $350 billion of new spending on the U.S. military, border security, and immigration enforcement.
“To my friends in the House, we’re moving because we have to,” Graham said. “We’re not building a wall, folks, we’re hitting a wall. They need the money, and they need it now.”
Johnson, on the other hand, has defended the one-bill approach.
“For the House, the one-bill strategy makes the most sense. We have a very diverse conference,” Johnson said at a news conference on Jan. 29, following a meeting of House Republicans in Doral, Florida.
He has since reiterated his commitment to that one-bill approach.
“We’re working on a one-bill strategy,” he told reporters at the U.S. Capitol building on Feb. 6.
The Senate and House Budget Committees, on Feb. 13 and Feb. 14 respectively, held long hearings on their draft budget resolutions, which they voted to advance to the floor.
The resolutions have substantial differences, chiefly in the amount of spending authorized for each policy area.
In the Senate resolution, the committees on homeland security are granted $175 billion worth of authority to increase spending over 10 years, to 2034—which is $85 billion more than the House has authorized.
Similarly, for the armed services committees, the Senate resolution grants $150 billion of authority, which is $50 billion more than the House resolution’s amount.
Additionally, per Graham’s strategy, the Senate resolution pertains to only one bill and does not include provisions about taxation and the sovereign debt limit that are featured in the House’s resolution, which together account for $8.5 trillion.
The Senate and House will need to pass exactly the same resolution in order to begin the bill-drafting process. Should they disagree, the committees will not be able to write a bill under the reconciliation process that avoids a filibuster in the Senate.
It is highly unlikely that any Democrats in either body will vote for the Republicans’ reconciliation bills.
Trump, for whose administration this funding has been authorized, has largely avoided the procedural debate in Congress over the bill—leaving it to Johnson and Graham to resolve.
“Whether it’s one bill or two [bills] ... it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same,” Trump, as president-elect, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 8 after a meeting with Senate Republicans to discuss this issue.
Complicating Johnson’s consideration of the budget resolution is the House Freedom Caucus, a subgroup of fiscal conservatives in the House Republican Conference. The caucus’s members have consistently called for greater reductions in government spending.
Given the Republican Conference’s one-seat majority in the House, just two defections from any budget resolution would prevent its passage in the case of opposition from all Democrats.
Should that happen, there would be no political mechanism to pass the same funding proposals without bipartisan support, which would likely mean incorporating demands from the other side of the aisle.
Johnson said that the House seeks to ensure that the reconciliation effort is “revenue neutral,” although it hinges on House Republicans’ expectations of higher economic growth and, thus, greater tax revenue to offset the new spending.
The Senate, by contrast, has no such measures in place.
The Senate and House Budget Committees did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
