House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, met with Senate Republicans on Wednesday to begin formulating an ambitious agenda for Washington if former President Trump is re-elected and Republicans regain control of the Senate and maintain their majority in the House.
Republicans in Congress are increasingly confident about the prospects of the November election given President Biden’s low approval ratings and are eager to have a bold package ready in January.
Senate Republicans feel they have a Senate majority within reach and are debating what proposals to include in a special budget reconciliation package (or packages) to avoid a filibuster, which requires most bills to pass the Senate with 60 votes.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is running to become the next Senate Republican leader, said Johnson told senators he “want to be ready to act immediately” if Republicans take control of the White House and Congress next year.
“We’re clearly looking to do something big, and that means more than just extending the tax cuts,” Cornyn said.
At a luncheon in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, just off the Senate floor, Johnson made his case to Republican senators for tax cuts, spending cuts and regulatory reform.
“We’ve got six months left, we’ve got to be prepared,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said of Republicans’ desire to have an agenda ready in case they take control of the White House and both houses of Congress in January.
“We have to think about what we can do,” he said. [of government’s] “We don’t know what will happen. The American people will decide in November, but the discussion should start with taxes.”
Extending Trump administration tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of next year, is a top priority, but Republican senators also have proposed significantly increasing defense spending and cutting mandatory government spending to reduce the projected federal deficit.
Cornyn appealed to his colleagues to tackle mandatory spending, which is approved outside the annual spending bill passed by Congress and has grown at a rate of 7 percent each year.
“We’ve tried to address spending by just looking at discretionary spending, and the fact is that discretionary spending hasn’t spiked as much as mandatory spending,” he said.
Cornyn said both Biden and Trump have made clear they don’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare, but there are other programs that need reform.
“I think it’s worth looking at other mandatory spending,” he said. “It’s an entitlement, and it’s growing at about 7 to 8 percent a year. So there’s about $700 billion in mandatory spending outside of Social Security and Medicare that I think needs to be looked at.”
He is also pushing for a big increase in defense spending, trying to get around Democratic opposition to increasing the Pentagon’s budget without “balancing” it with non-defense and social security programs.
“I [paying] What do senators care about? [Roger] Wicker [R-Miss.] “The president has talked about the need to increase defense spending,” Cornyn told reporters on Tuesday, referring to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Wicker’s goal of increasing defense spending from 2.9 percent of gross domestic product to 5 percent of GDP over the next five to seven years.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is set to step down as party leader at the end of the year, called reconciliation an “important tool” on Wednesday.
“The first step is we need a Republican president, a Republican House and a Republican Senate, otherwise there’s no reconciliation. This is an important tool, and I hope we have an opportunity to use it,” he told reporters.
Some political enthusiasts believe that the recent retirement of Senator Joe Manchin (Independent) from West Virginia, who left the Democratic Party, means that there is a good chance that Trump will defeat Biden and the Republicans will regain the majority in the Senate.
An election forecasting model published by The Economist magazine on Wednesday gives Trump a two-thirds chance of winning the White House and Biden a one-third chance.
The results are similar to a forecasting model released late last month by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill, whose latest update gives Trump a 56-100 chance of winning the presidential election and Biden a 44-100 chance.
Meanwhile, forecasters see the Lok Sabha elections as a 50-50 contest.
In the House of Representatives, 22 seats are in close races, with 11 Republican and 11 Democratic seats considered the most contested, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
“The main focus of the luncheon was that if we have Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, we should get started immediately on a positive, pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda that is focused on tax reform and regulatory reform,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said after the meeting.
But some Republican senators are trying to temper their colleagues’ expectations about what can be accomplished next year if Republicans control the White House and Congress.
Senate Republican Leader John Thune of South Dakota warned that policy-focused bills that would only have a minor impact on revenues, spending or the deficit would likely not meet the so-called Byrd rule and would not be eligible to pass the Senate with a simple majority under budget reconciliation.
“Obviously it’s a big issue and one of the reasons he’s here is to discuss a potential budget reconciliation process,” Thune told reporters.
But Thune warned that Senate rules limit the types of proposals Republicans can include in such a bill to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
“You have to have realistic expectations about what you can do there. Of course it has to be expenditures and revenues, budgetary issues,” he said. “We have restrictions here that the House doesn’t have to follow under the Byrd rule. There’s much more scrutiny of what you can and can’t do through the Senate budget reconciliation process.”
Thune noted that the Senate parliamentary secretary vetoed several bills that Senate Democrats, who controlled the White House, Senate and House in 2022 and 2021, tried to include in reconciliation packages.
“Some of the things Democrats tried to do were rejected,” he said.
“They wanted to raise the minimum wage, they wanted DACA, they wanted a clean energy plan, but they were all killed by lawmakers,” he said, referring to ambitious Democrats’ plans to give immigrants who came to the country at a young age a path to citizenship and cut emissions from power plants.
Al Weaver contributed.
