BURSTRepublican lawmakers say Congress’s near brush with a government shutdown shows that House Republicans do not have a functional majority, giving them a bad feeling about how difficult it will be to pass President-elect Trump's agenda in 2025.
While Republicans in both chambers broadly agree on the need to secure the border and extend Trump’s expiring tax cuts, GOP senators fear that passing legislation to accomplish those goals, as well as raising the debt limit and cutting federal spending, will be enormously difficult next year.
Republican senators say the turmoil within the House GOP conference this past week shows the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will face an enormous challenge in passing two budget reconciliation packages and debt-limit legislation in 2025.
“It’s going to be really hard in the House because they just simply don’t have a working majority,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).
The GOP is hoping to move two packages on border security and domestic energy production, and taxes through special budgetary rules that sidestep a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The problem, GOP senators worry, may be the House, where Republicans will only have a majority of one, two or three seats, depending on vacancies. At least two House lawmakers are headed to the Trump administration, while former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is not expected to take his seat in the next Congress.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) warned that “reconciliation is not easy, referring to the special budgetary process that can be used to circumvent a Senate filibuster.
“It’s hard to fit things in,” she said. “We’ve seen that demonstrated before.”
Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act during his first year in office failed in 2017 after three Republican senators — Murkowski, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and late-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — voted against the repeal bill that GOP leaders had tried to advance under budget reconciliation.
“When you have challenges in your own organization from the very get go — nobody said it’s going to be easy,” Murkowski said of how divisions within the Senate and House GOP conferences might derail some of Trump’s priorities.
“Next year’s going to be challenging,” she said.
Some Republicans say they lost confidence in Johnson after he unveiled a 1,547-page stopgap government funding package that immediately drew the opposition of President-elect Trump.
“It’s such an embarrassment,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said of swift collapse of the first stopgap funding package, which Johnson had negotiated for weeks.
“If they can’t manage the CR, how is he going to manage reconciliation? It’s bad. It bodes badly,” Hawley said of Johnson’s handling of the year-end spending debate.
Hawley declared he has “zero” confidence in Johnson and urged House lawmakers to consider a leadership shakeup.
“I don’t have a vote in the House but I’d strongly urge them to choose someone competent,” he said.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said he thinks a change in House leadership next year now appears “inevitable.”
“We’re going to need new leadership. We’ve got new leadership in the Senate in the coming year. And I believe that the writing’s on the wall, unless I’m just mistaken, it seems to me that new leadership in the House is almost inevitable,” Lee told “The Benny Show.”
He said the “process of government” had become “needlessly chaotic.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said putting together complex budget reconciliation packages to secure the border, expand domestic energy production, cut taxes, cut federal spending and possibly increase the debt limit will be much tougher than passing a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown.
“The level of complexity and risks that have to be managed are very, very high — trying to get a lot done in an environment where you don’t have a lot of margin for error in terms of getting voting blocks,” he said.
Tillis said he hoped things would “settle down a bit” in Washington “once we transition into next year and we can have more conversation with some of the people driving initiatives from the [Trump] administration.”
Johnson came under a barrage of fire on Tuesday and Wednesday after he unveiled the first version of a package to fund the government, provide disaster relief and help farmers.
He drew especially intense fire from billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who is heading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, before Trump himself announced he would oppose the bill.
The bill’s swift collapse and Trump’s surprise demand for Congress to raise the federal debt limit only a few days before federal funding was set to expire left lawmakers’ heads spinning.
“Oh, this is the way it’s going to be next year,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) quipped to reporters as he left the Capitol Wednesday evening, hinting that he expects next year to be a roller coaster ride.
Republican lawmakers are nervously anticipating a battle royale next year over raising the debt limit.
Johnson and other House Republican leaders on Friday worked to secure agreements from rank-and-file GOP lawmakers to agree the debt limit by $1.5 trillion in next year’s first reconciliation bill in exchange for $2.5 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending programs.
Peggy Bailey, the executive vice president for policy and program development at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said those pledged cuts could come from the part of the budget that includes through Medicaid and food assistance through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who is retiring from Congress, said there’s broad agreement among Republicans about the need to secure the border and extend the expiring 2017 tax cuts.
But he warned that the debate over raising the debt limit and to cut deeply into mandatory spending is likely to spark big fights within the GOP next year.
“Budgets and [spending] priorities are going to be tough and debt limit will be very difficult. I think that’s why President Trump has made that his cause célèbre,” Romney said.
Trump upended the spending debate on Capitol Hill Wednesday by demanding that Republicans add a two-year extension of the debt limit to the stopgap funding measure.
He made it clear that he didn’t want Democrats to use the debt limit as leverage next year to extract concessions on spending or other issues.
Trump’s demand for Congress to deal with the debt limit before he takes office may also signal that the incoming president recognizes it will be a tough issue for his party to handle next year.
A Republican senator who requested anonymity to speak warned the tax package will also be a heavy lift, given the razor-thin House GOP majority.
“Tax packages are always hard, all you have to do is say, ‘SALT,’” the lawmaker said, referring to the cap on state and local tax deductions that House Republicans from New York and other areas with high local taxes want to raise or eliminate in next year’s tax package.
The cap on SALT deductions is an issue that divides Republicans as many GOP lawmakers view SALT deductions as sops to rich people in expensive blue states.