This could be the week Senate Republicans finally move on the House’s budget resolution. But House Republicans, already cranky with the slow pace in the other chamber, have a warning: Change too much and the deal might be off.
Republicans have been working for months to come to an agreement on a budget resolution that would unlock the reconciliation process, realistically the only way to pass much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. In Trump’s ideal world, the reconciliation package would be jam-packed with policy changes on energy, defense, immigration, taxes and more.
Speaker Mike Johnson said at the Capitol last week that the bill will be “the largest, most consequential piece of legislation in decades, maybe one of the most in all of the history of Congress.”
There is, Johnson said, “no time to waste.”
But Johnson also acknowledged the delicate balance of the House’s budget, which lays out the spending constraints of the ultimate package. His margins in the House are microscopic, and bringing conservatives and moderates behind a singular budget resolution was something many Hill denizens thought was impossible.
“We did all that work. It took a lot of time, many, many months, to get us to where we are,” Johnson said. “The Senate is a little bit behind pace, not because they weren’t working hard, but because they were just engaging in other things.
“And so, what we’re trying to do now is fast forward their process, so they can get the CliffsNotes of basically what we did for the last year and skip through some of those steps,” he added. “Because we’ll all get to the same point.”
Still, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has openly said the House-budget will need changes to get through the upper chamber. Johnson’s margins may be even smaller than Thune’s, and there may be little room to renegotiate with House conservatives in particular, but there are red lines for Senate Republicans.
The House GOP’s budget resolution earmarks cuts to Medicaid benefits, does not make Trump’s tax cuts permanent, and includes an increase to the debt limit — all things that have received either skepticism or outright opposition from members of the Senate GOP.
(The Senate also adopted its own budget resolution, which Johnson has declared dead on arrival in the House.)
“Obviously it was a very delicate balance, and we shared this with Sen. Thune, that we had meetings for weeks and weeks to get that delicate balance put together, where the budget lays out the numbers for each committee,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said.
“They’re having some of those conversations now and realizing that for every member that thinks that the savings are too much, there’s some that think it’s not enough, and so you’ve got to find that balance,” he added.
At this point, there’s an increasing chance the House and Senate will need to go “conference” the bill — meaning a special meeting where leaders hash out details of legislation.
“I think we’ll be conferencing,” Sen. Thom Tillis said. “I think, unless we figure out a solid way to pre-conference, I think it’s likely we’re going to come to terms, and the president is going to probably have to play some balls and strikes if we can’t work out most of the differences between the two chambers.”
But that’s not a quick fix. Thune says he wants to get the budget resolution “done” in the Senate before members leave for their two-week recess in mid-April, while Johnson is aiming for reconciliation to be entirely done by Memorial Day.
Sources told NOTUS that while nothing is set in stone yet, the plan is for the Senate to adopt their compromise budget this week. The Senate could start adopting the budget as early as Wednesday, and it could drag out as late as Friday or possibly Saturday, two sources said.
“It’s fluid,” a senior Senate aide said.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Josh Hawley, said last week that “if the details are set on our resolution, it would be news to me.”
And when Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham was asked whether the resolution would move this week, his answer was less than definitive: “Maybe.”
Tillis was more ambitious, insisting that lawmakers are “pretty close.”
“The real work is reconciliation. It’s also the Byrd bath that will come with reconciliation,” he added, referring to the process in which the Senate parliamentarian vets whether a reconciliation bill meets the standard of the Byrd Rule, which requires reconciliation bills to be strictly related to the budget, and subjects provisions which are not to 60 votes.
Any Senate changes to the House-adopted resolution would have to be re-approved by the House. There is a means by which the resolution can “instruct” different levels of cost cutting in the House and Senate, but House conservatives are likely to be anxious over any attempts by the Senate to undercut by comparison.
“If they do the right thing and they act responsibly like the House did, I think we’ll celebrate it over here,” House GOP Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington said.
“And we will have a much more higher probability of success and a much more expeditious process of giving this to the President and making it the reality for the American people,” he added.
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Ursula Perano and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS. Daniella Diaz, a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.