It is Jan. 3, and Congress is reconvening for its new session with the House closely divided after Republicans won 220 seats and Democrats won 215 seats (although with Matt Gaetz’ resignation that will be down to 219 Republicans) and the first order of business being to elect a new Speaker, adopt the House’s rules and then get to work on behalf of the American people.
Regardless of who the new Speaker is, with a newly minted Senate Republican majority — 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats — President-elect Donald Trump will have opportunities this session to enact his wide-ranging agenda on providing tax relief to American people, incentivizing boosts of production in energy and agriculture to lower prices, curtailing illegal immigration including finishing the border wall and getting the spiraling federal budget and deficit under control.
The vehicles for doing so will be the budget bill, the appropriations and/or omnibus spending bills, any continuing resolutions that come up and any debt ceilings that arise, the latter of which was reinstated on Jan. 1 and will likely be one of the first things Congress has to address this year.
The appropriations and/or omnibus bills, continuing resolutions and any expansion or temporary termination of the debt ceiling will require 60 vote thresholds in the Senate, and usually require a bipartisan consensus to some degree in order to enact.
The House could produce Republican-led legislation for those items, but the new Speaker will have to navigate key divisions that tend to divide the House GOP on spending bills — usually House conservative Republicans will vote against those to some degree, as occurred with the most recent continuing resolution that extended current spending until March 14. If they are unable to unite, Trump and the House will have far less leverage than they otherwise could have to deal with the Senate.
At that point, appropriations and/or omnibus spending bills, continuing resolutions and debt ceilings will be a combination of what moderate Republicans and Democratic leadership negotiate with President Trump after he is inaugurated on Jan. 20. That’s very much the status quo in Washington, D.C., where getting most important items through require some degree of bipartisan consensus thanks to the century-old Senate cloture and filibuster rules.
But there is also the budget bill, which unlike the other vehicles, can be passed with meager partisan majorities, and was used by Republicans in 2001 for tax cuts, and again in 2017 for more tax cuts, reopening Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling and repealing the individual mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Similarly, Democrats used reconciliation in 2010 to pass key aspects of the Affordable Care Act and again in 2021 to enact the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that included green energy subsidies.
Generally, these pass along partisan lines with no supermajorities required, and so it will be up to House and Senate Republican leaders to unite their conferences to minimally get these done in 2025 and, if the opportunity permits, again in 2026. But with the House so closely divided, and special elections coming up in Florida and New York, Republicans might wish to get as much done as possible in the very first budget bill that comes up and before any members leave to join the Trump administration, leaving nothing to chance.
That means enact all of the tax cuts in President Trump’s agenda, build the wall, boost energy and agriculture production and include big reductions to discretionary spending and regulations. That can help bring costs down so that incomes have an opportunity to catch up to consumer prices and then the American people will have the much-needed relief they voted for in 2024.
But first Congressional Republicans have to unite. But can they? Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Reproduced with permission. Daily Torch – Keeping the light of liberty shining