WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson is laying down a highly ambitious timeline to approve President-elect Donald Trump’s big-ticket legislative agenda, vowing House passage in the next three months.
“We’re targeting April for final passage,” Johnson, R-La., told NBC News on Tuesday.
He reiterated that the House plans to pass Trump’s policy wishes on border security, domestic energy and taxes in “one big, beautiful bill.” Johnson has also called for including spending cuts and a debt ceiling increase in the bill.
It would be a herculean task with Johnson’s paper-thin House majority — and no expectation of winning Democratic votes. Republicans have a 219-215 margin, which is poised to temporarily shrink to 217-215 with two members leaving for the Trump administration. Johnson said earlier he wants to pass a budget resolution to kick off the “reconciliation” process by late February.
Republican senators are skeptical about speedily passing one bill that runs the gamut of Trump’s agenda.
“I think we’ve seen that the House is operating on a razor’s edge,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in an interview. “The more that we have this debate about one bill or two bills, that means we’re not passing a budget and we’re not dealing with reconciliation instructions. So I think we need to break the glass and acknowledge that the House may not be able to pass what the Senate can pass. … We need to all get on the same page. The limiting factor really, in my view, is what the House can pass.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., isn’t giving up on his push to break up the process into two bills to score a quick early victory on border funding, which has more GOP consensus.
“I’m hopeful that we can move a reconciliation package on legislation that addresses the border. And how that happens is still up for discussion, negotiation,” Thune told reporters Tuesday.
The clash over one versus two bills persists a week after Trump met privately with Senate Republicans to discuss strategy for his agenda. Senators said it was a spirited debate in which Trump voiced his preference for one bill but sounded agnostic about the process, which has encouraged both camps to dig their heels in.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said the meeting didn’t settle the spat.
“Does it look to you like it did?” he said, laughing. “It didn’t.”
GOP eyes $80 billion-$100 billion for the border
Cramer proposed a way out: Let Johnson and the House try to pass one bill, while the Senate starts with a smaller border-focused measure in anticipation of having to pivot to two tracks.
“Let Speaker Johnson and his team — who knows the House better than we do, and the House can be a problem, as you noticed — let them do what they feel like they need to do,” he said. “In the meantime, we do our bill. We do a smaller version. And you have both of them on the table at the same time.”
He said the Senate can give the House until April: “If you get too far into April,” the senator added, “people will get a little antsy.”
“Tax is more complicated. It’s going to take longer,” Cramer said, adding that border funding is “more time-sensitive than the tax piece of it, which is part of why I think the two-, two-track rationale makes sense to me.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the incoming Trump administration is prepared to crack down on immigration but added that it would benefit from having more resources early on.
“And that’s why I think we should do two bills,” Cruz said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told NBC News on Tuesday that his committee, which will oversee the immigration section of the bill, is in touch with Trump’s advisers.
“In all the things that you need for deportation and the wall and more personnel and that, the best place to get this answer is from Stephen Miller,” the immigration-focused Trump adviser, he said. “But we’ve heard somewhere between $80 billion and $100 billion.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Republicans need to enact difficult spending cuts in the legislation to lower the price tag and must be willing to take political risks to get it done.
“We need to make the tough decisions, and now we have a historic opportunity to do it,” he said. “And it’s going to take some courage, and it’s going to take putting your re-elections at risk.”
Debt ceiling and SALT deductions
Tillis also cast doubt on House Republicans’ lifting the debt ceiling on a party-line basis.
“I don’t know how that happens. If it does, it’d be extraordinary,” he said. “But with the votes in the House, I don’t see how it happens.”
Tillis suggested easing pressure on Republicans by breaking off the expiring child tax credit provisions and negotiating them in a separate bipartisan deal with Democrats, alongside health care funding and an expansion of the federal deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), which primarily affect high-tax states like New York and New Jersey.
“You got the child tax credit. You’ve got the subsidy for folks on the Affordable Care Act exchange. You’ve got a lot of Democrat priorities there that could actually take some pressure off of what we have to do in reconciliation by negotiating something in good faith,” he said. “SALT or not. I like salt on my pecans. I don’t like a lot of SALT deductions up here.”
But for now, Republicans plan to expand the SALT deduction in their party-line bill to appease House members in affected states.
Five House Republicans have formed a bloc to negotiate a SALT deal with party leadership, knowing their votes will make or break the package. They are Reps. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Tom Kean, R-N.J., and Young Kim, R-Calif.
“We’re sticking together on our greatest priority: increasing the SALT cap for our constituents,” LaLota said Wednesday. “We’ve agreed to work together and have each other’s backs.”
They don’t have an offer yet and continue to discuss details amongst themselves. Lawler said simply eliminating the marriage penalty by lifting the cap to $20,000 for couples aren’t enough.
“That’s woefully insufficient,” Lawler said.
Jon Traub, a managing principal at Deloitte Tax LLP and former Republican staff director on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said Johnson’s April target is aggressive.
That’s partly because of the maze of obstacles the Senate budget process will present to let Republicans evade the 60-vote threshold, requiring the bill to be limited to matters of taxing and spending.
“I think it’s very ambitious timing,” Traub said. “It’s not impossible, since I think the moving pieces are mostly identified and well-known. But putting them together with whatever revenue constraints they will self-impose — and getting agreement on the revenue targets in the first place — will be difficult.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
