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Tag: budget reconciliation

  • Trump May Have Already Signed His Last Big Piece of Legislation

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    Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

    Hard-core conservative Republicans have been agitating lately for a follow-up to last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A second budget-reconciliation measure would let them do various things that Democrats would normally be able to block in the Senate, if not in the House. Some want a Second Big Beautiful Bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, such as Trump and Republicans unsuccessfully tried to pass in 2017. Others may want to implement some of Trump’s recent proposals to put thousands of dollars into the pockets of taxpayers right before they vote in the 2026 midterms, deficits be damned.

    But whatever fantasies Republicans were harboring seem to have come to an abrupt end. Last week, the president said one Big Beautiful Bill was enough, per Politico:

    President Donald Trump on Tuesday ruled out pushing another one-party reconciliation package through Capitol Hill.

    “In theory we’ve gotten everything passed that we need,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow. “Now we just need to manage it. But we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”

    … The president didn’t rule out any legislation in the remainder of his term, but indicated he’s focusing on smaller-scale bills.

    “Do we have other things in mind? Yeah. We do — we have things in mind,” Trump said. “And we have, perfecting a little bit about what we did.”

    This means Trump is standing pat for the midterms, at least legislatively. Sure, he and his congressional allies will pursue “messaging bills” like the SAVE Act, which they are currently ventilating about at great length. But they know that such bills won’t survive a Senate filibuster. And it’s abundantly clear by now that Senate Republicans won’t kill the filibuster, either; this is the one thing — perhaps the only thing — they won’t give Trump in a million years, since they need to preserve the filibuster for a future Democratic presidency. So what Trump is admitting is that it’s time to buckle down for the midterms and forget about addressing troublesome issues like health-care costs or ICE outrages that would require a degree of genuine bipartisanship that has largely gone out the window since the president’s second inauguration.

    Obviously enough, the president will continue his efforts to expand his own powers to the maximum, making legislation — and Congress itself — largely unnecessary. But if you look closely at what he told Kudlow, he wasn’t just talking about 2026; he said, “We’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years” [emphasis added]. Now, in part he may be thinking of the current brouhaha over ICE; the super-funding of immigration enforcement in the OBBBA means his masked thugs don’t need further money from Congress until every single immigrant has been deported. But more generally, he may feel inclined to stop relying on Congress for much of anything until he leaves the White House in 2029.

    The truth is, of course, that he may not be able to rely on Congress for much of anything in the last two years of his presidency. The odds are very high that Republicans will lose control of the House in November. History says so; conditions in the country are nothing like those in the two midterms since FDR when the president’s party didn’t lose House seats. And the handicappers agree: The Kalshi prediction market currently projects a Democratic majority of at least ten seats. Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate, but a Democratic-wave election could still flip the chamber. Even if Republicans lose only the House, you can forget about any budget-reconciliation bills like the OBBBA. And thanks to the torching of bipartisanship by the 47th president and his congressional allies, compounded by Trump’s lame-duck status, there’s precious little Congress will be able to do on a simple majority-vote basis.

    Yes, in the waning days of a Trump administration there will still be occasional crises over must-pass legislation involving appropriations and debt limits. (It’s now estimated that the federal debt limit will again be breached by the spring or summer of 2027.) There may be partial or full government shutdowns now and then, which could lead to bipartisan negotiations on spending or even unrelated matters. And a lot of the overall atmospherics in Washington will depend on whether there is a Republican Senate to approve Trump’s judicial and executive-branch appointments (if not, you could see a vast number of judicial openings along with temporary appointments to key federal offices). But any way you slice it, the legislative phase of Trump 2.0 may be coming to an end. And the president himself seems fine with that. Believe it or not, he may become even more aggressive in asserting that he can do whatever he wants without congressional authorization.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Johnson Urges GOP to Save Craziness for After the Election

    Johnson Urges GOP to Save Craziness for After the Election

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    Mike Johnson has a plan for global domination.
    Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

    The ongoing tension between MAGA extremists and what passes for a governing wing of the House Republican Conference has now been crystalized by a standoff between House Speaker Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. MTG is threatening to give Johnson the Kevin McCarthy treatment (a motion to vacate the chair, which brought down MTG’s friend McCarthy last fall) if he brings forward a bill containing the aid to Ukraine that Joe Biden, most Democrats, and about half of congressional Republicans appear to want. There are many dimensions to this battle, particularly when you ponder Donald Trump’s potential intervention in the dispute, since both Johnson and Greene are very much Trump vassals. But more broadly, the two lawmakers are partaking in an eternal GOP debate: Is it better to pursue the (sometimes wacky) desires of the party’s base or to delay those dreams and maximize swing-voter appeal?

    Johnson made his side of the argument gently but clearly in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Gowdy, as reported by The Hill:

    Heading into that tough debate, the Speaker took a shot of his own at Greene, warning that internal clashes between Republicans will only empower Democrats ahead of high-stakes elections when both chambers are up for grabs.

    “I think all of my other Republican colleagues recognize this as a distraction from our mission,” Johnson told Gowdy. “The mission is to save the republic. And the only way we can do that is if we grow the House majority, win the Senate and win the White House. So we don’t need any dissension right now.”

    To the MTGs of the world, the whole purpose of political power is to agitate the air on behalf of extremist ideology, and there’s no time like the present for that sort of First Amendment exercise. Furthermore, Greene would almost certainly maintain that wacky right-wing positions on the issues of the day are precisely how you build an enduring electoral coalition, since it’s what the silent majority secretly craves. But putting those sentiments aside, you cannot really weigh the merits of Johnson’s plea for a delay of ideological gratification without a look at the benefits of a partisan trifecta (control of the White House and both congressional chambers), which he thinks “dissension” might threaten.

    Most obviously, a federal government held entirely by Republicans would eliminate much of the need for all those maddening negotiations with Democrats that Johnson, like McCarthy, felt required to undertake. Yes, so long as the Senate filibuster remains you’d have to deal with a Senate Democratic minority on many kinds of legislation. But a trifecta also gives the party holding it the opportunity to bypass the filibuster and all sorts of potential congressional obstacles via the infamous budget-reconciliation procedure, in which any legislation with a budgetary impact can (in theory) be enacted by a simple majority in each House. It’s how Obamacare was enacted, and how it was very nearly repealed when Republicans gained a trifecta after the 2016 elections. Republicans did succeed in passing Trump’s proposed package of tax cuts via reconciliation before they lost control of the House.

    So if like both Johnson and MTG you would prefer massively reduced funding levels for all sorts of liberal domestic programs, with conservative policies encumbering what’s left, a trifecta in November would be great news. It’s true that Trump already has extremely ambitious and dangerous plans for a second term that may be initiated by executive order instead of legislation. But to the extent he can secure congressional authorization for the semi-authoritarian state he seems to want, the federal courts may become less of an obstacle, and the new administration would not have to worry about any obstruction of MAGA plans by congressional Democrats, either.

    Johnson can’t come right out and say that continued chaos in his own conference might cost Trump and/or Senate Republicans votes, since the conceit of the right-wing House rebels is that they are the true MAGA loyalists by definition. But it’s true that control of the White House is what’s all-important to the GOP in November, and the second most important goal is control of the Senate. It’s the upper chamber that could confirm Trump’s executive and judicial nominees without fear of a filibuster. All in all, a trifecta would be the ideal lever to pull off a radical MAGA counter-revolution with a relative minimum of open defiance to the U.S. Constitution and the messy public disturbances that might entail. Trump would be smart to remind MTG that global domination awaits if Republicans can just play their assigned roles in his restoration drama.


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    By Ed Kilgore

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