Republicans In Congress Are Speaking Massive About The First 100 Days. They’re Not Speaking About All The Roadblocks.

Tax cuts. Sealing the border. Boosting the army.

These are all issues Republicans and president-elect Donald Trump have on their agenda for subsequent yr’s Congress. And with GOP management of the Home and Senate, and Trump within the White Home, expectations are excessive that they’ll rating some huge and rapid victories.

Precisely what Republicans wish to prioritize continues to be unclear. Extending greater than $4 trillion in expiring particular person revenue tax cuts might be highest on the listing and top-of-mind for Trump. And in Congress, there’s help for offering as much as $120 billion for extra Border Patrol brokers, wall building and deportation infrastructure, in addition to bolstering vitality manufacturing and protection.

However these targets could also be quite a bit simpler stated than carried out.

Whereas Democrats and Republicans may want a “trifecta” — management of each chambers of Congress and the White Home by the identical social gathering — to get a lot of something carried out in Washington, even that’s no assure.

And the unwieldy legislative course of Republicans should use to beat Democratic objections is a troublesome one, with limits that many Make America Nice Once more sorts will chafe at.

In the mean time, Republicans are projecting unity and confidence. Home Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) met with Senate Republicans Dec. 3 to get a really feel for a way they wished to strategy the approaching time period.

“We’re absolutely convinced that we can keep those [campaign] promises. We’re excited to do it. There’s a real esprit de corps among the Republicans in Congress right now,” Johnson stated on Fox Information Tuesday.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the Home majority chief, advised reporters how nicely preliminary intraparty discussions have been going.

“The Trump administration and Trump officials in the transition team have been part of those conversations,” he stated. “Because we want to make sure the day we start in January, President Trump’s policies are going to be front and center.”

Making guarantees and maintaining them are completely different beasts. With a skinny margin within the Senate and an much more by-the-skin-of-their-teeth grip on a majority within the Home, only a few Republicans might want to defect from a vote to trigger chaos for his or her social gathering.

“Every senator, every member of the House of Representatives in the Republican caucus is going to be essential to them, and so they will have to worry about every different political tug that they have in their caucus,” one Democratic Capitol Hill veteran of previous finances fights advised HuffPost.

The Home passes payments by majority votes. The Senate is a little more difficult; due to a longstanding rule often called the filibuster, most payments want 60 votes, not 50, to go. In 2025, Senate Republicans can have 53 votes to Democrats’ 47.

However Republicans can have a workaround for a few of their greatest concepts.

The method they’ll want to make use of is named finances reconciliation, a wonky phrase originating from the concept that coverage modifications recommended in budgets will probably be found out after the very fact in subsequent spinoff payments.

The simplest method to consider reconciliation is just like the world’s worst online game.

First, you must go on a quest to get members of your social gathering to collect sufficient magic tokens (finances resolutions) to unlock a power-up (a filibuster-proofing of the reconciliation payments) that permits you to overcome the opposite social gathering’s defensive defend (filibuster) within the Senate. After that, you face a day-long last boss battle (a prolonged 12- to 18-hour lengthy sequence of votes within the Senate known as a vote-a-rama, culminating in a last vote on the general package deal). And solely then does your invoice go to the president, who decides whether or not or to not signal it.

And the method can break down at any level — from big-picture points, like conservative members being cautious of voting for a finances that may lead to a $50 trillion nationwide debt by the mid-2030s (the present official congressional projection), to particular person energy performs, like a senator who threatens to not vote for the ultimate invoice due to some last-minute change made throughout the vote-a-rama.

In 2017, Republicans’ six-year-long try to roll again Barack Obama’s Inexpensive Care Act got here to an abrupt finish after the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) gave his well-known thumbs-down gesture on the Senate flooring, rendering all of the work and political capital spent to get to that time meaningless.

Even the primary query Republicans should face might simply divide them: How far more are they prepared to pile on high of the present $36 trillion-plus in federal debt?

They’ll want to start out there, as a result of step one within the reconciliation course of is passing a finances decision. That decision will specify deficits and debt ranges for years forward, in addition to the final areas the place lawmakers will look to make modifications in later laws.

“The speaker has a real hurdle here, I think, just getting a budget resolution passed,” given the GOP’s slim margins, stated Invoice Hoagland, a former Republican finances staffer who now heads the Bipartisan Coverage Heart.

Funds votes are powerful politically as a result of they offer sitting lawmakers’ opponents ammunition throughout marketing campaign season. Challengers can say a lawmaker voted for probably unpopular measures like elevating taxes or reducing well-liked applications, all primarily based on the numbers within the finances decision they voted for. Whereas passing budgets was routine up till the late Nineties, each events now keep away from voting on them in any respect until it’s a part of a reconciliation course of.

Every finances can spin off as much as three separate payments — a tax invoice, a spending invoice and a debt restrict invoice. Passing two budgets, one for the federal government’s present fiscal yr and one for the following, would give Republicans twice as many probabilities to get these tax/spending/debt restrict payments via the Senate with out worrying they could possibly be filibustered.

What ought to go within the first spherical and what can anticipate the second is one thing congressional Republicans should resolve, Hoagland stated.

“I think this idea that somehow we’re going to get a budget resolution and reconciliation done in 30 days is a little bit overly optimistic. Maybe 100 days for the first one, but that’s going to still take some time,” he stated.

Johnson stated he expects to do two reconciliation payments. “The determination right now is where does the tax piece fit in? Do we do that first out of the gates, or do you wait a couple months to get all that done? Because it can be very complicated,” he stated Tuesday.

Even when these questions get answered, the method itself might nonetheless stymie Republicans. Not each coverage proposal is eligible for reconciliation. Greater than half a century of finances legislation has created a mishmash of guidelines and norms limiting what will be included in them and what can’t be.

These guidelines could make for some odd interactions. For instance, a Senate rule prohibits pushing via modifications to Social Safety with reconciliation. That would particularly rule out one in all Trump’s signature tax proposals — scrapping taxes on Social Safety funds.

The one that makes selections on guidelines questions like that’s the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. She is tasked with nonpartisan advisory duties — and typically, meaning she makes important calls on which provisions will be in or out of a reconciliation invoice.

If MacDonough guidelines towards Republicans’ insurance policies, she might face being fired. It’s occurred earlier than, and the Democratic staffer stated it’s a “real concern for those who like the process to be played fair and square.”

Hoagland stated he doubted that might occur. But when it did, it will be a tragic ending for MacDonough, who directed her employees to safeguard the containers with the states’ electoral votes throughout the 2021 rebellion try, defending the election outcomes from the mob.

“If it wasn’t for her and her staff on Jan. 6, 2021, who grabbed those boxes and got them off the Senate floor, I don’t know where we would be today,” Hoagland stated.

Comparable strain could possibly be utilized to the Congressional Funds Workplace, Congress’ designated scorekeeper, which estimates how a lot every proposal from lawmakers would add or subtract from the finances deficit. To make the numbers look much less dangerous, committees might direct the CBO to solely measure the prices in favorable methods — significantly by judging the value of recent tax cuts however not the prices of extending the non permanent ones.

The CBO director, Phillip Swagel, would then be pressured to decide on which scores CBO finally publishes.

If Republicans can hold their social gathering united sufficient to go two budgets; resolve on which priorities go into one, two or extra reconciliation payments; get favorable scoring and procedural selections from the CBO and the Senate parliamentarian; and get a invoice or payments to the Senate flooring, they might nonetheless face one final check: a vote-a-rama.

Beneath a quirk of Senate guidelines, as soon as the time restrict for debate has ended on a finances invoice, any senator can supply any modification on the ground, a course of that goes on till no extra senators wish to supply amendments.

The ensuing marathon of votes — normally 30 to 40 votes, every taking about 20 to half-hour — is a stamina check for senators, who should stay close to the Senate flooring to vote all the time. And these amendments are sometimes much less about altering the invoice or finances than making the opposing social gathering take politically embarrassing stances that can be utilized towards them within the subsequent marketing campaign.

“We should acknowledge, for folks — some of whom are in advanced years — it’s a physical cost to have to go through such a long period of votes in a row,” the Democratic staffer stated.

In 2022, one such vote-a-rama went from 5:11 p.m. the primary day till 3:04 p.m. the following day.

As a result of vote-a-rama amendments can embrace nearly something, the vote-a-rama can be the Senate at its most contentious. In that sense, it’s a reminder of how partisan the method of passing landmark payments has change into.

In distinction, the one two latest bipartisan payments enacted with out utilizing reconciliation have been payments to spice up home pc chip manufacturing and enhance America’s infrastructure. The latter two payments handed with at the least some bipartisan help, with the CHIPS Act getting 243 votes within the Home and the roads and bridges invoice incomes 69 votes within the Senate.

Hoagland, who took half as a Senate GOP aide in previous reconciliation battles, stated passing huge payments with solely one-party help is simply the best way it’s now.

“When I go back and think about the years that I was up there and look at the votes, it was tough, but there were Republicans and Democrats that voted together on some of these big issues,” Hoagland stated.

However now, he stated, “it’s not there.”