Today’s notice: John Thune has big plans for reconciliation. Markwayne Mullin has big hopes for Pete Hegseth. And Ways and Means Democrats have big regrets about the price of eggs.
Schrödinger’s Reconciliation Bill
Senate Republicans emerged from their Tuesday conference meeting with Donald Trump with a plan to convert their legislative dreams into a MAGA reality next year: two separate reconciliation bills — one that tackles MAGA-approved border, defense and energy policies, and another that addresses expiring tax cuts.
“The first one, we can get done fairly quickly,” Sen. Mike Rounds told reporters Tuesday of incoming Majority Leader John Thune’s plan. “And the second one, which will take a little bit more time.”
While lowering the vote threshold for two bills to maximize the Senate’s ability to pass conservative policies during a trifecta sounds nice in theory, senators who have been around the block for a few administrations have seen this film before… and they didn’t like the ending.
Read: For leadership, a two-bill strategy can conveniently create something of a Schrödinger’s cat situation. Everyone’s dream policies can be alive and dead at the same time — that is, until one bill actually passes.
Speaker Mike Johnson will likely face the biggest challenge. Though the speaker told NOTUS’ Reese Gorman he supports the two-pronged plan, he will have his hands full wedging two separate bills through his chamber with a measly one- or two-vote majority — not to mention Trump’s habit of moving the goalposts mid-negotiations.
Like Sen. Susan Collins put it to reporters: “Reconciliation is extremely complex, as those of us who have been through it before know.”
—Riley Rogerson | Read the story here.
This Sounds Familiar, Because It Is
“We’ll save it for the second bill” was also the mantra when Democrats held a tight trifecta in 2021. During infrastructure bill negotiations, leadership wanted a bipartisan win, and told progressives to leave their priorities for a second reconciliation bill. Shortly after the second bill, Build Back Better, was launched, Sen. Joe Manchin told Fox News he wouldn’t support that scale of social spending and the whole thing died.
Progressive lawmakers took a pounding in primaries for voting against the infrastructure law, and some of them lost reelection. Some of the operatives who worked those races remember the BBB fight as a kind of fork in the road for the Biden administration away from progressive populism toward a more centrist stance. We asked a few how they viewed the GOP interest in copying this kind of strategy. They said it was like looking in a fun house mirror.
“If they just want to extend the Trump tax cuts on the wealthy, they’ll probably do the opposite” of what centrist Democrats did to progressives, said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats. “Drum up a bunch of support for the other bill with all the shit in it, and then hide the tax cuts for rich people.”
Andrabi did say that there’s opportunity for Democrats if the GOP two-bill plan leaves the populist Trump promises unpassed. The working class could be up for grabs again, and could be convinced to vote Democratic if the party drops “the diet Republicans who block everything,” Andrabi said.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro
Front Page
- One Democrat’s Quest to Release the Gaetz Ethics Report: Democratic Rep. Sean Casten intends to force a vote.
- How Trump’s Department of Education Could Target Trans Students: LGBTQ+ advocates fear Trump will let harassment and discrimination complaints go uninvestigated.
Hegseth’s Senate Prizefighter
As defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth tries to woo senators to support his embattled confirmation bid, he has a prizefighter in his corner, literally. NOTUS’ John T. Seward and Em Luetkemeyer report that Sen. Markwayne Mullin — a former MMA fighter — has taken up being Hegseth’s chief promoter on Capitol Hill.
“He doesn’t have a better friend,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told NOTUS.
Mullin has repeatedly stumped for him in the media, even calling him “perfect” on Fox News. But whether Mullin will be able to convince 49 of his fellow senators to look past allegations of heavy drinking, womanizing and sexual assault that dog his nomination remains to be seen.
Bad Ways to Say What You Means
Democrats have spent nearly all of the 27 days since the election beating each other up over how they failed to convey their economic agenda to voters. So more than a few eyebrows went up yesterday when a snarky post about consumer sentiments appeared on the official House Ways and Means Democrats X account. After it started gaining criticism online, it was deleted.
We asked Ways and Means Dems about the post less than an hour after it appeared, and never heard back. NOTUS’ Calen Razor was asking Ways and Means committee member Rep. Terri Sewell about the post when her aide interrupted to say the lawmaker hadn’t seen it. Rep. John Larson told Calen he hadn’t seen the post either but negated the sentiment: “All I can say is that people are still struggling to make ends meet,” he said, adding that Democrats needed to talk about “kitchen table” issues like social security.
Republicans were unsurprisingly eager to talk. “Talk about your all-time out of touch, disgraceful comments,” Mike Johnson wrote on X.
Our take: The post probably would have played better on Bluesky.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro
A Trump Department of Education
LGBTQ+ advocates are bracing for major changes in the Department of Education’s civil rights division under Trump, particularly when it comes to Title IX, which protects students in educational programs that receive federal funding against discrimination based on sex.
“We all know that the person who was just elected as president does not actually believe that there is a problem with sexual harassment or discrimination on the basis of gender,” Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, director of the advocacy group GLSEN, told NOTUS’ Torrence Banks.
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.
- U.S. Zoos Gave a Fortune to Protect Pandas. That’s Not How China Spent It. By Mara Hvistendahl at The New York Times
- No more daylight saving time? Musk, Ramaswamy muse on ending clock changes. By Dan Diamond at The Washington Post
- Why Uvalde—A Rallying Cry for Texas Democrats—Went for Trump by Allegra Hobbs at Texas Monthly
Be Social
Bears, Beets, Deputy Democratic Conference Secretary
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 3, 2024
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