Failure looms large

Risk of failure looms large as GOP starts drafting the ‘big, beautiful bill’

Republicans are hoping that speed and a push from Donald Trump can keep their legislative agenda afloat.

By Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill

They know it’s going to be big. They want it to be beautiful. Now congressional Republicans need to decide what’s going to be in it — and they’re confronting the very real possibility they might not be able to figure it out.

A Thursday House vote might have finalized a fiscal framework for the GOP’s domestic policy megabill, but completing that intermediate step exposed huge fissures between the House and Senate over a range of issues crucial to finishing the sprawling legislation that’s expected to span tax cuts, border security, energy and more.

Speaker Mike Johnson made big promises to a band of fiscal hawks about steep spending cuts, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune has left himself maximum flexibility to placate his own conference. Competing GOP factions, meanwhile, have drawn all sorts of red lines for the bill — many of them wholly incompatible.

And that has some Republicans worried about what’s ahead.

“I know the dialectic is supposed to produce a final result, but sometimes it doesn’t — many times up here, it doesn’t,” said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. “We can spend an entire year getting nothing done.”

Looming large over the GOP’s sprint toward a “big, beautiful bill,” as President Donald Trump has demanded, is what happened last time Republicans tried to sprint out of the gate and pass a big party-line policy priority after a Trump inauguration. Their 2017 effort to remake American health care ran aground after dominating the first seven months of Trump’s tenure as president.

Many Republicans, particularly in the Senate, warned against lumping the party’s entire legislative agenda into one must-pass package — calling it a recipe for division and delay. Now many of those same voices are urging GOP leaders to move fast and not let the process get bogged down.

Kennedy said he wants a 60-day deadline to hash out a bill before calling in Trump to resolve their differences, while Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last week he’s aiming to get the bill to Trump by Memorial Day.

“If this thing drags out too long, I’m gonna say break it apart,” said Graham, who has pushed for months to separate out the especially thorny questions about tax policy into a second bill. Kennedy added that senators will have to “assert themselves — they can’t just come to our lunches and bitch.”

Johnson and Thune are cognizant of the need for speed.

They have urged their committee chairs to use the two-week recess now underway to ramp up their private talks with members and start bridging the vast differences between the two chambers, with a goal of having panels start advancing pieces of the megabill once lawmakers return to Washington at the end of the month. The joint budget plan approved Thursday orders committees to deliver their respective sections of the bill by May 9, though that deadline is not binding.

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told reporters Friday that the House would go first in drafting the megabill, sharing Graham’s highly ambitious goal of getting it to Trump’s desk by Memorial Day. However, Arrington warned if Senate Republicans “materially change” the bill the House sends over, “that’s only going to imperil the ‘America First’ agenda, and it’s only going to prolong the process.”

Senators, however, are not in the habit of taking a back seat to their House colleagues — and are publicly warning that their own chamber’s rules will shape the end result. Many Senate Republicans have also signaled they feel unconstrained by the House fiscal targets, which include a goal of making a minimum $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.

The Senate gave its own committees a drastically smaller deficit reduction goal. And though Thune privately tried to reassure the House’s deficit hawks and aligned himself with Johnson’s aspirations, he pointedly did not commit to that number. He acknowledged to reporters separately that he has colleagues on “both sides” of the push to get to $1.5 trillion.

“I’m concerned about how we’re going to figure out how we do this between two bodies,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said about the House target.

Johnson, meanwhile, has his own well-known headaches to deal with. To squeeze the budget plan through Thursday, he pledged to holdouts that the eventual bill will stick to the House’s framework — including the $1.5 trillion minimum for cuts. The speaker was so desperate to seal a deal he told hard-liners they could strip him of his gavel if he didn’t keep his word.

In a preview of the headaches to come, Thune’s “both sides” comment sparked an immediate shot across the bow from Rep. Chip Roy, a key fiscal hawk who took aim at a critical piece of the Senate’s plan: counting an extension of Trump’s 2017 cuts as costing nothing. The Texas Republican warned separately that falling short on deficit reduction targets would “make it impossible for me to support a final reconciliation product.”

Even some Senate Republicans, including typical leadership allies, are worried the eventual bill will punt on major spending cuts. “We have a famous tradition around here of eating our dessert and not our vegetables,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

The fiscal sniping has only fueled the dismal vibes among some Republicans, with Kennedy predicting an impasse between the House and Senate GOP that would require Trump to “break the tie,” “arbitrate the trade-offs” and “put his muscle behind” any bill to get it to his desk.

One of the big issues Trump will likely have to arbitrate could involve touching the third rail that shocked him before — health care.

The House budget includes an instruction that the Energy and Commerce Committee reduce the deficit by $880 billion — a directive that could be impossible to meet without steep cuts to Medicaid, the safety-net health program that insures millions of Americans.

Factions of Republicans in both the House and Senate have serious qualms about going down that path. Some GOP senators have opened the door to implementing narrow work requirements, but even proponents of sweeping changes acknowledge they do not have the votes for another idea the House is considering to meet its ambitious fiscal target: reducing the federal government’s share for Medicaid expansion payments.

Leaders know very well that hard choices lie ahead, with numerous votes at stake. As Johnson tried to seal his agreement with conservative fiscal hawks Thursday morning, he dashed onto the House floor to reassure a half-dozen moderate Republicans that he would not take away Medicaid benefits, according to lawmakers in the huddle. The group had been withholding their votes before they received those assurances from the speaker.

“We made it very clear once again that we would not vote for anything that takes away benefits from legally eligible recipients,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) said.