Thune, Johnson seek breakthrough on stalled Trump agenda
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and key committee chairs from the Senate and House will meet Tuesday in hope of reaching a breakthrough on President Trump’s stalled agenda, including border security, energy and tax reform.
Thune told reporters he is hoping the Senate will act on a budget resolution in the next three weeks that would lay the groundwork for moving a package later this year to secure the border, expand domestic oil and gas drilling, boost defense spending by at least $100 billion and extend Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts.
“I want to get it done this work period,” he told reporters Monday.
Tuesday’s meeting will include Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Treasury Department Secretary Scott Bessent, along with Thune and Johnson.
The Speaker has set a goal of getting that “one big, beautiful bill” to Trump’s desk by the end of April or — at the latest — by Memorial Day, but Thune has privately told Senate colleagues that ambitious timeline is unrealistic, and that getting it passed by the end of July is a more attainable target.
House Republican leaders are running out of patience with divisions among Senate Republicans over how to craft a budget resolution and released a statement Monday morning calling for the Senate to take up and immediately pass the resolution it passed Feb. 25.
“The American people gave us a mandate and we must act on it. We encourage our Senate colleagues to take up the House budget resolution when they return to Washington,” Johnson said in a joint statement with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and other House lawmakers Monday morning.
Thune later in the day pushed back on the pressure from the House, emphasizing that the Senate would follow its own process, keeping in mind that any package that comes to the floor needs 51 votes to pass.
“It’s a process,” he said, reminding his colleagues that “at some point, the House is going to need us.”
“If we’re going to win, we got to play on both sides of the ball,” he said. “It’s a bicameral process. That’s the nature of the beast.”
Asked if the Senate would take up the House-passed budget resolution as Johnson is urging, Thune replied, “The Senate is going to do what we can get 51 votes for here in the Senate, and hopefully what they can get 218 for in the House.”
“In the end, we have to come together. We obviously have to be able to pass the same budget resolution in order to unlock reconciliation. And so we will at some point [reach an] agreement on what that looks like,” he said.
The reconciliation process is critical because it will allow the legislation to dodge a Senate filibuster, ensuring that Democrats cannot block the measure in the upper chamber. But the measure will also have to meet various rules required for budget reconciliation packages.
The House proposal calls for cutting taxes by $4.5 trillion and reducing federal spending by $2 trillion over the next decade, but several Senate Republicans are balking at an instruction calling for $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts that they fear would hit Medicaid hard.
It would be difficult for the committees charged with finding those spending cuts to do so without cutting Medicaid, an entitlement increasingly used by GOP voters.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last month that the House-passed budget would need “a major overhaul” before it could pass the Senate.
Graham and Crapo have faulted the bill for not making an extension of the Trump tax cuts permanent, something Senate Republicans say could be accomplished by using a special budgetary baseline to project the costs of the bill.
Crapo says that if the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is scored as “current policy,” extending the tax cuts permanently would not count as adding to the deficit, since they would be considered merely an extension of the status quote.
But conservatives in the House and some Republicans in the Senate, including Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.) and Todd Young (Ind.), have questions about this approach. Critics argue that merely scoring $4.5 trillion in tax cuts as current policy would not erase their impact on future revenues and deficits.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said a lot of Tuesday’s bicameral meeting would be devoted to discussing Trump’s tariff policies, which have created uncertainty in the business sector and weighed on the stock market.
He said Senate Republicans will likely take up the House-passed budget resolution in hopes of making changes to it on the floor to speed its passage.
“I think right now, we plan on taking the House bill and see if we can amend it to some degree,” he told reporters.
Mullin said the question of how to make the Trump tax cuts permanent is the biggest difference between the two chambers.
One major question facing Senate Republicans is whether the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, will rule to allow Republicans to use the “current policy” baseline to project the tax cuts as not adding to the deficit beyond the 10-year budget window.
Democrats led by Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, have argued that doing so would violate the rules of budget reconciliation, which Republicans are using to get Trump’s agenda past a filibuster in the Senate.
If MacDonough finds that using a current policy baseline violates Senate precedent, then the Trump tax cuts could not be made “permanent” beyond 10 years as Crapo, Graham and other GOP senators hope.
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