WASHINGTON – President Mike Johnson is setting a highly ambitious timeline for passing President-elect Donald Trump’s expensive legislative agenda, promising to have it passed by the House within the next three months.
“We’re targeting April for final approval,” Johnson, R-La., told NBC News on Tuesday.
He reiterated that the House plans to approve Trump’s policy wishes on border security, national energy and taxes in “one big, beautiful bill.” Johnson has also called for spending cuts and an increase in the debt ceiling to be included in the bill.
It would be a herculean task with Johnson’s slim majority in the House of Representatives and no expectation of winning Democratic votes. Republicans have a 219-215 margin, which is about to temporarily shrink to 217-215 with two members leaving for the Trump administration. Johnson previously said he wants to pass a budget resolution to begin the “reconciliation” process by the end of February.
Republican senators are skeptical about quickly passing a bill that encompasses Trump’s entire agenda.
“I think we’ve seen that the House is operating on a knife edge,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in an interview. “The more we debate one 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 recognize that the House may not be able to pass what the Senate can pass. …We need to get everyone on the same page. In my opinion, the limiting factor really is what the House can pass.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is not giving up his attempt to split the process into two bills to achieve a quick early victory on border funding, which has more Republican consensus.
“I am hopeful that we can push a reconciliation package on legislation that addresses the border. And how that happens is still under discussion and negotiation,” Thune told reporters Tuesday.
The clash over one-versus-two bills persists a week after Trump met privately with Senate Republicans to discuss his agenda strategy. Senators said it was a lively debate in which Trump expressed his preference for a single bill but remained agnostic about the process, which has encouraged both sides to hold firm.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R.N.D., said the meeting did not resolve the dispute.
“Does it seem that way to you?” he said, laughing. “It wasn’t like that.”
The Republican Party foresees between 80,000 and 100,000 million dollars for the border
Cramer proposed a way out: Let Johnson and the House try to pass a bill, while the Senate starts with a smaller measure focused on the border in anticipation of having to pivot toward two tracks.
“Let’s let President Johnson and his team (who know the House better than we do, and the House can be a problem, as you may have noticed) do what they feel they need to do,” he said. “In the meantime, we do our math. We make a smaller version. And you have both on the table at the same time.”
He said the Senate can give the House until April: “If it goes too far in April,” the senator added, “people are going to get a little anxious.”
“Taxes are more complicated. It’s going to take longer,” Cramer said, adding that border financing is “more urgent than the tax part, which is part of the reason I think the two-track logic 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 from the start.
“And that’s why I think we should introduce two bills,” Cruz said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told NBC News on Tuesday that his committee, which will oversee the immigration section of the bill, is in contact with Trump’s advisers.
“On all the things that are needed for deportation and the wall and more personnel and all that, the best place to get this answer is from Stephen Miller,” Trump’s immigration-focused adviser said. “But we’ve heard it’s somewhere between $80 billion and $100 billion.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Republicans must enact difficult spending cuts into legislation to lower the price and must be willing to take political risks to do so.
“We need to make difficult decisions and now we have a historic opportunity to do so,” he said. “And it will take some courage and it will take putting their re-elections at risk.”
Debt ceiling and SALT deductions
Tillis also cast doubt on the possibility of House Republicans raising the debt ceiling along partisan lines.
“I don’t know how that happens. If that were the case, it would be extraordinary,” he said. “But with the votes in the House, I don’t see how it will happen.”
Tillis suggested easing pressure on Republicans by tearing up the expiring child tax credit provisions and negotiating them into a separate bipartisan deal with Democrats, along with health care funding and an expansion of 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 have the subsidy for people on the Affordable Care Act exchange. “There are a lot of Democratic priorities that could really take some pressure off of what we need to do on reconciliation by negotiating something in good faith,” he said. “GET OUT or not. I like salt on my nuts. I don’t like a lot of SALT deductions here.”
But for now, Republicans plan to expand the SALT deduction in their partisan bill to appease House members from affected states who could make or break the bill.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R.N.Y., a swing district lawmaker who favors a higher SALT deduction, said simply eliminating the marriage penalty and imposing a $20,000 limit for couples, as some have proposed, would not It’s enough.
“That is woefully insufficient,” Lawler said.
Lawler, Rep. Nick LaLota, R.N.Y., and three other Republicans are teaming up to negotiate a SALT deal with party leaders, knowing their votes will be decisive in passing the across-the-board extension of the tax cut.
Jon Traub, managing director at Deloitte Tax LLP and former Republican staff director on the House Ways and Means Committee, said Johnson’s target for April is aggressive.
This is in part due to the maze of obstacles the Senate budget process will present to allow Republicans to bypass the 60-vote threshold, which will require the bill to be limited to tax and spending issues.
“I think it’s a very ambitious time,” Traub said. “It is not impossible, since I believe that the moving parts are mostly identified and well known. But matching them with any self-imposed income restrictions (and agreeing on income targets in the first place) will be difficult.”
