Welcome to the Washington trifecta, Republicans. Now get ready to wait.
Even as the GOP takes unified control of the House, Senate and White House on Monday, congressional leaders are facing doubts about just how quickly they will be able to deliver major wins for Donald Trump. Their legislative plans are highly unsettled, and the clock is ticking toward distracting fights over federal spending and the debt limit.
And when it comes to the heart of Trump’s agenda — a sprawling party-line effort encompassing border, energy and tax policy — key strategic questions remain in flux. Once they agree on the general direction of travel, leaders will then have to navigate a thicket of nasty intraparty disputes on the policies themselves.
Under the most ambitious timeline put forth by Speaker Mike Johnson, it will be Memorial Day before that bill lands on Trump’s desk. Deeply skeptical Senate Republicans are readying their own conflicting plans in case the House falters.
“Everybody is feeling the pressure now of time,” said Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus who has been pushing for quicker action. “In a short period, we’ve got to make something happen.”
Some smaller wins are at hand: Thanks to some Democratic cooperation in the Senate, Republicans expect to send a relatively small-bore immigration bill to Trump this week.
Named after a Georgia nursing student murdered last year, the Laken Riley Act would require broader incarcerations of undocumented immigrants accused of crimes. But it’s only a sliver of what Trump has in mind for immigration policy.
To fill out the House floor schedule in the first weeks, Johnson is eyeing bills on abortion and public safety that will likely get filibustered in the Senate. He’s also planning to put a bipartisan forestry and wildfire prevention bill up for a vote this week, with Congress unlikely to pass any aid for the wildfires tearing through California until at least March.
The Senate will churn through confirmations of Trump’s Cabinet and other nominees. And both chambers are hoping to use Congressional Review Act powers to claw back key Biden administration rules, something GOP leaders hope will help calm antsy conservatives.
But there is a massive distraction also looming: A March 14 government funding deadline that could result in a government shutdown if Trump and Republicans can’t come to a deal with congressional Democrats who still hold leverage due to the Senate filibuster.
Johnson has been moving carefully on the spending discussions and the party-line agenda talks, mindful of staying on the same page as Trump — who upended the last spending deal the speaker cut with Democrats in December. This time Johnson wants Trump’s sign off on key details related to both initiatives, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door conversations. But it’s unclear if that will ever come.
Meanwhile, the committee chairs who will actually have to write the bills are left tapping their feet. “We’re running out of time,” said House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who is waiting on top-line discretionary spending targets.
Settling some of these outstanding questions is likely to be on the agenda for a high-level meeting between Trump and congressional leaders Tuesday. Impatience is already emerging as a theme in interbranch relations: In a series of meetings last week on Capitol Hill, Trump policy chief Stephen Miller relayed the president-elect’s desire for “immediacy” in pushing through his legislative agenda.
The pressure is just as intense inside the House, where Norman and his fellow Freedom Caucus members continue to push a two-track approach to the party-line agenda in defiance of Johnson.
They want a smaller, border-focused package first that includes a debt limit hike and spending cuts. That’s essentially the opposite of what Johnson is now steering the conference toward — one massive bill with tax reform included but leaving a debt limit hike for bipartisan government funding talks.
Listed as a “key benefit” in the Freedom Caucus plan: “Speed to deliver huge early wins on key priorities for President Trump.”
Johnson, who shares fears with some House committee chairs that breaking up the bills could make them harder to pass given his narrow majority, tried to temper the unrest by laying out an aggressive timeline for pushing through the sprawling megabill in a closed-door conference meeting last week.
The timeline was a good start, one GOP lawmaker said leaving the meeting. “But at the end of the day, we need to know the plan,” the member said.
The speaker has also launched a listening tour. He is with scores of members about the plans, with a focus on hearing out their thoughts on making trillions of dollars in highly controversial spending cuts. GOP Whip Tom Emmer has corralled small working groups to hash out members’ diverging demands.
Meanwhile, leaders in both chambers are counting on Trump to settle things down with a flurry of Day One executive orders, many of which are expected to deal with immigration and reversing Biden-era climate and pandemic policies. Those actions, they hope will dampen the hard-liners’ push for immediate and sweeping legislative action on the border.
“I expect the president’s going to develop hand cramps signing executive orders,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “And that will demonstrate meaningful progress.”
But many senators still want to push their own two-track plan — notably Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is preparing a border-first budget blueprint to jam the House with, should Johnson fail to deliver on a tight timeline.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), who attended a meeting with Miller and House Republicans last week, said Trump’s early immigration executive orders would be “a good start” but “not permanent” and Republicans want to “codify” those executive actions in law — quickly.
