Tax cuts. Sealing the border. Boosting the military.
These are all things Republicans and president-elect Donald Trump have on their agenda for next year’s Congress. And with GOP control of the House and Senate, and Trump in the White House, expectations are high that they’ll score some big and immediate victories.
Exactly what Republicans want to prioritize is still unclear. Extending more than $4 trillion in expiring individual income tax cuts is probably highest on the list and top-of-mind for Trump. And in Congress, there’s support for providing up to $120 billion for more Border Patrol agents, wall construction and deportation infrastructure, as well as bolstering energy production and defense.
But those goals may be a lot easier said than done.
While Democrats and Republicans might need a “trifecta” — control of both chambers of Congress and the White House by the same party — to get much of anything done in Washington, even that is no guarantee.
And the unwieldy legislative process Republicans will have to use to overcome Democratic objections is a tough one, with limits that many Make America Great Again types will chafe at.
At the moment, Republicans are projecting unity and confidence. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) met with Senate Republicans Dec. 3 to get a feel for how they wanted to approach the coming term.
“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 said on Fox News Tuesday.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority leader, told reporters how well preliminary intraparty discussions have been going.
“The Trump administration and Trump officials in the transition team have been part of those conversations,” he said. “Because we want to make sure the day we start in January, President Trump’s policies are going to be front and center.”
Making promises and keeping them are different beasts. With a thin margin in the Senate and an even more by-the-skin-of-their-teeth grip on a majority in the House, very few Republicans will need to defect from a vote to cause chaos for their party.
“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 past budget fights told HuffPost.
The Rules Of The Game
The House passes bills by majority votes. The Senate is a bit more complicated; thanks to a longstanding rule known as the filibuster, most bills need 60 votes, not 50, to pass. In 2025, Senate Republicans will have 53 votes to Democrats’ 47.
But Republicans will have a workaround for some of their biggest ideas.
The process they’ll need to use is called budget reconciliation, a wonky phrase originating from the idea that policy changes suggested in budgets will be figured out after the fact in subsequent spinoff bills.
The easiest way to think about reconciliation is like the world’s worst video game.
First, you have to go on a quest to get members of your party to gather enough magic tokens (budget resolutions) to unlock a power-up (a filibuster-proofing of the reconciliation bills) that allows you to overcome the other party’s defensive shield (filibuster) in the Senate. After that, you face a day-long final boss battle (a lengthy 12- to 18-hour long series of votes in the Senate called a vote-a-rama, culminating in a final vote on the overall package). And only then does your bill go to the president, who decides whether or not to sign it.
And the process can break down at any point — from big-picture issues, like conservative members being wary of voting for a budget that will result in a $50 trillion national debt by the mid-2030s (the current official congressional projection), to individual power plays, like a senator who threatens not to vote for the final bill because of some last-minute change made during the vote-a-rama.
In 2017, Republicans’ six-year-long attempt to roll back Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act came to an abrupt end after the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) gave his famous thumbs-down gesture on the Senate floor, rendering all the work and political capital spent to get to that point meaningless.
Even the first question Republicans will have to face could easily divide them: How much more are they willing to pile on top of the existing $36 trillion-plus in federal debt?
They’ll need to start there, because the first step in the reconciliation process is passing a budget resolution. That resolution will specify deficits and debt levels for years ahead, as well as the general areas where lawmakers will look to make changes in later legislation.
“The speaker has a real hurdle here, I think, just getting a budget resolution passed,” given the GOP’s narrow margins, said Bill Hoagland, a former Republican budget staffer who now heads the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Budget votes are tough politically because they give sitting lawmakers’ opponents ammunition during campaign season. Challengers can say a lawmaker voted for potentially unpopular measures like raising taxes or cutting well-liked programs, all based on the numbers in the budget resolution they voted for. While passing budgets was routine up until the late 1990s, both parties now avoid voting on them at all unless it is part of a reconciliation process.
Each budget can spin off up to three separate bills — a tax bill, a spending bill and a debt limit bill. Passing two budgets, one for the government’s current fiscal year and one for the next, would give Republicans twice as many chances to get those tax/spending/debt limit bills through the Senate without worrying they could be filibustered.
What should go in the first round and what can wait for the second is something congressional Republicans will have to decide, Hoagland said.
“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 said.
Johnson said he expects to do two reconciliation bills. “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 said Tuesday.
Johnson at an event on Wednesday. via Associated Press
Even if those questions get answered, the process itself could still stymie Republicans. Not every policy proposal is eligible for reconciliation. More than half a century of budget law has created a mishmash of rules and norms limiting what can be included in them and what can’t be.
These rules can make for some odd interactions. For example, a Senate rule prohibits pushing through changes to Social Security with reconciliation. That could specifically rule out one of Trump’s signature tax proposals — scrapping taxes on Social Security payments.
The person who makes decisions on rules questions like that is the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. She is tasked with nonpartisan advisory duties — and sometimes, that means she makes critical calls on which provisions can be in or out of a reconciliation bill.
If MacDonough rules against Republicans’ policies, she could face being fired. It’s happened before, and the Democratic staffer said it’s a “real concern for those who like the process to be played fair and square.”
Hoagland said he doubted that would happen. But if it did, it would be a sad ending for MacDonough, who directed her staff to safeguard the boxes with the states’ electoral votes during the 2021 insurrection attempt, protecting the election results 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 said.
Similar pressure could be applied to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ designated scorekeeper, which estimates how much each proposal from lawmakers would add or subtract from the budget deficit. To make the numbers look less bad, committees could direct the CBO to only measure the costs in favorable ways — particularly by judging the price of new tax cuts but not the costs of extending the temporary ones.
The CBO director, Phillip Swagel, would then be forced to make a decision on which scores CBO ultimately publishes.
If Republicans can keep their party united enough to pass two budgets; decide on which priorities go into one, two or more reconciliation bills; get favorable scoring and procedural decisions from the CBO and the Senate parliamentarian; and get a bill or bills to the Senate floor, they would still face one last test: a vote-a-rama.
The Final (Senate) Battle
Under a quirk of Senate rules, once the time limit for debate has ended on a budget bill, any senator can offer any amendment on the floor, a process that goes on until no more senators want to offer amendments.
The resulting marathon of votes — usually 30 to 40 votes, each taking about 20 to 30 minutes — is a stamina test for senators, who must remain near the Senate floor to vote the entire time. And these amendments are often less about changing the bill or budget than making the opposing party take politically embarrassing stances that can be used against them in the next 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 said.
In 2022, one such vote-a-rama went from 5:11 p.m. the first day until 3:04 p.m. the next day.
Because vote-a-rama amendments can include almost anything, the vote-a-rama is also the Senate at its most contentious. In that sense, it’s a reminder of how partisan the process of passing landmark bills has become.
Reconciliation was used in 2010 for Obamacare, in 2017 for Trump’s tax cuts, in 2021 for Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan stimulus and 2022 for the renewable energy-focused Inflation Reduction Act.
In contrast, the only two recent bipartisan bills enacted without using reconciliation were bills to boost domestic computer chip manufacturing and improve America’s infrastructure. The latter two bills passed with at least some bipartisan support, with the CHIPS Act getting 243 votes in the House and the roads and bridges bill earning 69 votes in the Senate.
Hoagland, who took part as a Senate GOP aide in past reconciliation battles, said passing big bills with only one-party support is just the way it is 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 said.
But now, he said, “it’s not there.”
