WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson has set an ambitious timetable to approve President-elect Donald Trump’s major legislative agenda, vowing to get it through the House within the next three months.
"Our goal is final passage in April," Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told NBC News on Tuesday.
He reiterated that the House plans to pass Trump's policy aspirations on border security, domestic energy and taxes with "a big, beautiful bill." Johnson also called for spending cuts and a debt ceiling increase to be included in the bill.
That will be a difficult task with Johnson's slim majority in the House and no hope of winning Democratic votes. The Republican lead is 219-215, and with two lawmakers leaving the Trump administration, the Republican lead will temporarily shrink to 217-215. Johnson earlier said he hoped to pass a budget resolution by the end of February to start the "reconciliation" process.
Republican senators are skeptical of quickly passing a bill that would cover the entirety of Trump's agenda.
“I think we’ve seen the House operating on a knife’s edge,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in an interview. "The more we debate one or two bills, that means we're not passing a budget and we're not dealing with reconciliation directives. So I think we need to break the glass and acknowledge that the House may not be able to pass what the Senate can pass. . . .We need consensus. The real limiting factor, in my opinion, is what the House can pass."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has not given up on his efforts to split the process into two bills to achieve a quick and early victory on border funding, which has gained more Republican consensus.
"I hope we can come up with a settlement on legislation that addresses the border issues. And how that happens remains to be discussed and negotiated," Thune told reporters on Tuesday.
A conflict over two bills continues a week after Trump met privately with Senate Republicans to discuss strategy for his agenda. Senators said it was a heated debate in which Trump expressed his preference for one bill but sounded agnostic about the process, emboldening both camps to hold their ground .
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said the meeting did not resolve the dispute.
"Do you think it's like it used to be?" he said with a smile. "No."
Cramer proposed a way out: Let Johnson and the House try to pass a bill, while the Senate starts with a smaller border-focused measure that is expected to have to move onto two tracks.
“Let Speaker Johnson and his team — who know the House better than we do, which, as you noted, can be a problem — let them do what they think needs to be done,” he said. "In the meantime, we're going to do our bill. We're doing a smaller version. And those two issues are on the table at the same time."
He said the Senate could give the House April: "If April drags on too long," the senator added, "people are going to get a little anxious."
"Taxes are more complicated. It's going to take longer," Cramer said, adding that border funding "is more time-sensitive than the tax part, which is why I think the case for a two-track system makes sense to me. Part of the reason.”
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said the incoming Trump administration is preparing to crack down on immigration, but added that it would benefit from having more resources sooner rather than later.
"That's why I think we should have two bills," Cruz said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told NBC News on Tuesday that his committee will oversee the immigration portion of the bill and is in contact with Trump's advisers.
"Of all the things that are needed, including deportations, a wall and more people, the best place to get answers is Stephen Miller," a Trump adviser who focuses on immigration, he said. "But we're hearing between $80 billion and $100 billion."
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Republicans need to enact tough spending cuts in legislation to lower the price tag and must be willing to take political risks to get the job done.
"We need to make tough decisions and now we have a historic opportunity to do it," he said. “It takes some courage and putting your re-election on the line.”
Tillis also expressed skepticism about House Republicans moving to raise the debt ceiling along party lines.
"I don't know how this happened. If it did, it would be extraordinary," he said. "But based on the vote in the House, I don't know how that's going to happen."
Tillis recommended ending the expiring child tax credit and negotiating a separate bipartisan agreement with Democrats, as well as health care funding and expanding the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Alleviating pressure on Republicans, which mostly affects upper-income people. -Taxing states like New York and New Jersey.
"You've got the child tax credit. You've got subsidies for people who participated in the Affordable Care Act exchanges. There are a lot of Democratic priorities there that could actually be mitigated by negotiating in good faith on some of the things we have to do in terms of reconciliation. The pressure to do something,” he said. "With or without salt. I like salt on my pecans. I don't like too much of a salt deduction here."
But for now, Republicans plan to expand the SALT deduction in their party-line bill to appease House members in affected states who could make or break the bill.
New York state swing-district Assemblyman Mike Lawler, who favors increasing the SALT deduction, said simply eliminating the marriage penalty and setting a $20,000 cap for couples, as some have proposed, is not enough.
"It's not nearly enough," Lawler said.
Lawler, Rep. Nick LaLotta, D-N.Y., and three other Republicans are joining forces to negotiate a SALT deal with party leaders, knowing their votes will be critical to passage of the overall tax cut extension. important.
Jon Traub, managing principal at Deloitte Tax LLP and a former Republican staff director for the House Ways and Means Committee's tax-writing committee, said Johnson's April goals were aggressive.
That's partly because the Senate budget process will create hurdles that would allow Republicans to avoid a 60-vote threshold that would require the bill to be limited to tax and spending issues.
"I think this is a very ambitious time," Traub said. "It's not impossible because I think the moving pieces are mostly identified and well known. But putting them together with any revenue constraints they impose on themselves and agreeing on revenue targets in the first place is going to be difficult. "