April 3, 2025: Senate budget brouhaha & House procedural pandemonium
Good morning, all,
Congress aims to take next steps on President Trump’s legislative priorities by the end of next week. We’ll get into how that’s looking in each chamber below.
The goal for next week: get on the same page
The House and Senate GOP are aligned on their overall goals: renew and expand corporate-friendly tax policies from the first Trump Administration; greenlight hundreds of billions of dollars for the Pentagon and deportations; and defund programs like Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 70 million Americans.
In February, the House and Senate passed budget resolutions to tee up reconciliation—the fast-track process Congress is using to move the President’s legislative priorities with only GOP votes. For details on this process, check out The Basics of Budget Reconciliation.
However, the chambers did not approve the same budget resolution. Think of these budget resolutions like an outline. The House and Senate need to agree to an identical outline for legislation before they can start filling it out.
Congress’ goal is to pass the same budget resolution in both the House and Senate before heading home for recess next Thursday. Here’s how that’s going..
The Senate: making moves
Senate GOP leaders just released a revised budget resolution that—Republicans hope—could win both the House and Senate’s approval. Reminder: under the reconciliation process, the budget resolution directs specific House and Senate committees to write parts of the reconciliation bill and tells each of those committees how much to change government spending or revenue.
The Senate is expected to approve this budget resolution this weekend, sending it to the House to (perhaps) vote on next week. We’ll get to them later.
Below is a summary of the Senate resolution’s new instructions on what committees should spend and cut over the next 10 years.
Big takeaways from the new budget resolution
New resolution, same impact
The Senate may have made some changes, but at its core, this latest budget resolution will have the same impact on the public:
More than 30 million Americans will lose their Medicaid health insurance;
More than 40 million will see their SNAP assistance (food stamps) shrink, with many losing assistance altogether; and
Tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy will be cemented for years to come.
For brevity’s sake in an already-long update, I won’t describe these enormous impacts at length, but you can find deeper dives in our previous updates here, here, and here.
A compromise without compromises
The instructions to House and Senate committees are quite different. Yes, the committees’ jurisdictions don’t all overlap neatly, so it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Even so, some of the divides aren’t hard to spot. For example, the Senate Armed Services Committee is told to spend $50 billion more than its House counterpart. On top of that, the resolution proposes that the Senate increase the debt limit by $5 trillion, and the House by $4 trillion.
Here’s the problem: House Republicans want to make deeper cuts and spend less than the Senate does. But the chambers are eventually going to have to resolve these differences to get a bill signed into law. This resolution might delay a reckoning, but it doesn’t prevent one.
Changing what “cost” means
Last week, I previewed the Senate GOP’s plan to get around the hefty (as in, like, $4 trillion) cost of permanently extending the corporate tax giveaways President Trump and the GOP Congress approved in 2017—without running afoul of a rule barring reconciliation bills from blowing up the deficit after 10 years.
Their solution? Change what “cost” means. Basically, GOP senators argue that because the expensive tax breaks are already in-place, extending them is not a new cost for the government—which, they claim, means it’s not a cost at all. And if it’s not a cost at all, they don’t have to make even bigger unpopular cuts to satisfy reconciliation’s rules.
That’s a key principle behind this budget resolution, which stipulates that Congress can permanently renew the 2017 tax provisions set to expire later this year without counting the cost of doing so for the purposes of using the fast-track reconciliation process.
The Senate’s parliamentarian will decide whether this argument, often called the “current policy baseline,” passes muster under reconciliation’s rules. If she says no, Republicans could retool their plans, ignore her, or fire her—a rare move, but one with precedent.
Tight deadlines
The resolution tells House and Senate committees to finish drafting their assigned portions of the reconciliation package by May 9, presumably in an attempt to meet Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) Memorial Day goal for getting the package to the President’s desk. I get into how realistic that is in our last update.
The House: making fewer moves
To get into where things are in the House, we need quick rundowns on some wonky House procedural issues, so buckle up!
Remote voting for new parents in the House
Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) are leading an effort to change the House’s rules to allow parents in Congress to vote remotely for 12 weeks after the birth of a new child. Right now, new parents must miss House votes if they’re recovering from childbirth and caring for a newborn and can’t make it to DC.
Discharge petitions
House Republican leadership opposes the change and, as a result, won’t schedule a vote on it. However, Reps. Luna and Pettersen used a rarely-successful tool known as a “discharge petition” to force a vote if the majority of House members (218) sign the petition to do so. Having reached that threshold, GOP leadership is now obligated to schedule a vote—and since the 218 members that signed the petition will presumably also vote for the rule change, that vote is poised for success.
But the House GOP leadership and some far-right Republicans really don’t like this change. So, they too have employed a procedural tool to kill the proposal and prevent it—or any proposal like it—from coming to a vote they know would pass. More on that in a moment, after one more definition (I’m so sorry).
The “rule”
Before the House votes on a bill, it must pass a resolution setting parameters for debate on that bill (e.g., how long debate will last, how many amendments will be considered, etc.). That resolution is known as “the rule.” Typically, the party in the majority votes for the rule and members in the minority oppose it. There are exceptions, but generally, this is how big legislation moves through the House.
Importantly: the rule governing a bill’s debate must pass before the bill can even be debated, let alone voted on. So, taking down the rule on a bill is akin to blocking that bill.
Now that we’ve run through the jargon…
House Republican leadership slipped language to quash the discharge petition on remote voting for new parents into a rule governing debate for unrelated bills this week. If that rule passed, it would allow the House to debate the bills on its agenda for the week—while also preventing a vote on Reps. Luna and Pettersen’s proposal or anything like it.
However, the rule did not pass. In fact, nine House Republicans joined all Democrats to oppose the rule. Thus, the remote voting proposal lives another day.
What does this have to do with reconciliation!?
Remember that budget resolution both chambers need to pass to kick off the reconciliation process? Well, the House has to pass a “rule” to consider that resolution, too—and reporting indicates the House GOP leadership may include the same language to kill remote voting for new parents in the rule governing debate on that resolution.
If leadership proceeds, a vote to allow the President’s legislative agenda to move forward will simultaneously be a vote to block the remote voting proposal.
So, what happens next?
While Speaker Johnson claims to be working on a solution to this impasse, it seems like right now House leadership wants to make voting to preserve the proposal for new parents as painful as possible.
At the same time, members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus are threatening to oppose any rule that does not kill the proposal allowing new parents to vote—so, even if leadership caved and let remote voting move to a vote, its problems wouldn’t necessarily go away.
The question is, which House Republicans stand their ground if/when the President’s legislative agenda is on the line?
I think it’s too soon to tell. For one thing, we don’t know how the Speaker’s apparent negotiations on this will shake out. For another, we don’t know how hard the President will personally (and publicly) push members to advance his legislative agenda. Posting about the bill in general is one thing, but naming holdouts’ names and making phone calls is another.
We also don’t know how effective a personal Trump push will be—but evidence suggests it’ll be pretty effective at getting GOP members in line. Have members been willing to buck Trump on high-profile votes? Yes. But have members’ old red lines gotten less rigid over the past few months? Also yes.
On top of that, some House Republicans have balked at the Senate’s failure to support what they deem sufficiently deep cuts to programs like Medicaid as part of its budget resolution. As a result, some House Republicans might be reluctant to support the Senate budget resolution regardless of the remote voting issue.
By the end of next week, Republicans in Congress could be well-positioned to start working on the President’s agenda in earnest—or on their way back to their districts in a holding pattern. We’ll keep you posted no matter what happens next.
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