House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) met with Senate Republicans on Wednesday to begin laying out an ambitious agenda for Washington if former President Trump is re-elected and Republicans regain control of the Senate. Senate and maintain a majority in the Chamber.
GOP lawmakers are increasingly confident about their prospects in the November elections given President Biden’s low approval numbers and want to have a bold agenda ready to roll out in January.
Sensing that the Senate majority is within their reach, Senate Republicans are discussing what proposals to include in a special budget reconciliation package – or multiple packages – to get around the filibuster, which requires most legislation to pass the chamber. high with 60 votes.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is running to become the next Republican leader in the Senate, said Johnson told senators he wants to “be prepared to get to work immediately” if Republicans control the White House and Congress. in the next year.
“He’s made it very clear that they want to try to grow, and that means more than just extending tax cuts,” Cornyn said.
Johnson presented Republican senators on tax cuts, spending cuts and regulatory reforms during a lunchtime meeting in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room near the Senate floor.
“There are six months left, we have to prepare,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said of Republican lawmakers’ desire to put together an agenda if they control the White House and both chambers of Congress in January.
“We need to be able to think about what are the key issues that we could solve,” he said. “We don’t know what the makeup is [of government’s] it will be. The American people will decide that in November, but we should start talking about it, starting with taxes.”
Extending Trump-era tax cuts, which expire at the end of next year, is at the top of the list, but Republican senators are also proposing a big increase in defense spending and cuts in mandatory government spending to reduce the deficit. federal projected.
Cornyn suggested to his colleagues that they address mandatory spending, which is authorized outside of annual spending bills passed by Congress each year and which grows at a rate of 7% per year.
“We try to deal with spending by just looking at discretionary spending. In fact, discretionary spending has not increased as much as mandatory spending,” he said.
Cornyn said both Biden and Trump have made it clear they don’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare, but says there are other programs that need reform.
“I think it’s worth looking at other mandatory spending,” he said. “It’s a right and it’s been growing at around 7 or 8 percent a year. And so there’s about $700 billion in non-Social Security and non-Medicare mandatory spending that I think we should look at.
He is also promoting a large increase in defense spending to circumvent Democratic opposition to increased funding for the Pentagon without “parity” for social and non-defense spending programs.
“I’ve been [paying] pay attention to what Sen. [Roger] Wicker [R-Miss.] is saying about the need to spend more on defense,” Cornyn told reporters Tuesday, referring to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and his goal to increase defense spending by 2.9 percent. of gross domestic product to 5% in the next five to seven years.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who will leave his leadership role at the end of the year, on Wednesday called reconciliation “an important tool.”
“The first step is that we need to have a Republican president, a Republican House and a Republican Senate, or there will be no reconciliation. It’s an important tool. We hope to have the opportunity to use it,” he told reporters.
Some politically challenged people now see Trump as the favorite to defeat Biden and Senate Republicans as likely to return to the majority, given the retirement of Senator Joe Manchin (I), who recently left the Democratic Party in West Virginia.
An election forecasting model released by The Economist on Wednesday gave Trump a 2 in 3 chance of winning the White House. This gave Biden a 1 in 3 chance of winning.
The results are similar to a forecasting model Decision Desk HQ and The Hill released late last month. In the most recent update of this model, Trump has a 56-100 chance of winning the presidency, while Biden has a 44-100 chance.
Meanwhile, people with disabilities see the battle for the House as a contest.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report says there are 22 close races in the House, with 11 Republican seats and 11 Democratic seats considered most up for grabs.
“The main focus of the lunch was if and when we have Republican majorities in the House and Senate, we must begin working on a positive, pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda that focuses on tax reform and regulatory reform,” said the senator Ted Cruz. (R-Texas) after the meeting.
But some Republican senators are trying to temper their colleagues’ expectations about what could be accomplished next year if Republicans control the White House and Congress.
Senate GOP leader John Thune (SD) warned that policy-focused legislation that only has a tangential impact on revenues, spending or the deficit would likely not comply with the so-called Byrd Rule and would not be eligible to pass. in the Senate with a simple majority within the scope of budget reconciliation.
“The big issue, obviously, and one of the reasons he’s here, is to talk about a potential budget reconciliation process,” Thune told reporters.
But Thune warned that Senate rules limit the types of proposals Republicans could include in that package to get around a Democratic filibuster.
“You have to keep your expectations realistic about what you can do there. It has to be, obviously, expenditure and revenue, budgetary,” she stated. “We have restrictions here that the House does not have to comply with under the Byrd Rule. There is a much more rigorous analysis of what you can and cannot do” through the budget reconciliation process in the Senate.
Thune highlighted that the Senate parliamentarian rejected several legislative proposals that Senate Democrats tried to fit into a reconciliation package when they controlled the White House, Senate and House in 2022 and 2021.
“There were several things that were dropped that Democrats tried to do,” he said.
“They wanted to raise the minimum wage, they had the DACA thing and they had their clean energy plan. All of those things were eliminated by the parliamentarian,” he said, referring to Democrats’ ambitious plans to give migrants who arrived in the country at a young age a path to citizenship and to reduce emissions from power plants.
Al Weaver contributed.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
