The next budget hurdle: House-Senate negotiations

Congressional Republicans have a long way to go before they can send a “big, beautiful” tax, immigration, and defense bill to President Trump’s desk.

Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are set to begin talks to resolve major differences in the budget resolutions adopted by the House and Senate last month and eventually adopt a compromise resolution.

But further action from the Senate will likely not come for a few weeks—at the earliest—amid the pressing, separate issue of passing a spending bill that keeps the government open beyond next week.

The prospect of a shutdown aside, Congress must adopt a budget resolution before Republicans can advance their multitrillion-dollar package using the reconciliation process, which will allow them to avoid a potential filibuster and pass the measure in the Senate later this year on a simple majority. So far, there is little consensus on which budget resolution—which gives individual committees instruction on how to write the broader reconciliation bill—to adopt. Nor is there consensus on a timeline by which the chambers should adopt the measure.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has told reporters that he wants final House passage of the reconciliation bill by Easter, an ambitious timeline, given how far apart Republicans remain. None of their efforts are expected to draw any Democratic support.

On the other side of the Capitol, senators are indicating that it may take some time for their chamber to approve a compromise budget resolution that’s presentable to everyone.

Senators on Tuesday appeared ready to see if the House can meet Johnson’s timeline on crafting the reconciliation bill before approving a compromise budget bill.

“The House has made some suggestions as to what their timeline would like to be, and I’m encouraging them,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told reporters Tuesday. “I would like to see that as well. Some folks say that’s optimistic. I hope it’s realistic for them because I think what we passed, in terms of the border, in terms of energy, in terms of the security, is something that the president wants, and they need to money for border work.”

If a compromise begins to bog down, Barrasso said his chamber would shift to its version of the budget resolution, which breaks the reconciliation bill into two parts, leaving the expensive and politically thorny tax portion—renewing trillion of dollars in expiring household tax breaks—for later this year.

“Depending on how long that takes, if it’s too long for the president in terms of what he wants, I don’t know if [Trump is] going to then say, ‘Hey, let’s get that Senate bill passed now and get it into place,’ because we have a little more leeway in terms of the tax situation because the taxes aren’t scheduled to go up until the end of the year,” Barrasso said. He added that Senate Republicans spent their Tuesday lunch conference discussing how to move forward on the process.

Several Republican staffers told National Journal not to attach any deadline for the budget resolution to pass or land on either of the chambers’ floors, as respective committees are just beginning to put pen to paper for their recommendations, only now getting the ball rolling on the process.

Addressing Trump’s 2017 tax cuts—which are set to expire at the end of this year—remains the biggest hurdle as the behind-the-scenes bicameral talks begin. And it’s not just over whether to write one bill or two. Senate Republicans, for example, remain steadfast in their demand of making the tax cuts permanent, a condition not currently part of the House proposal.

In the House, the next move is for committees to begin drafting legislative language, which Johnson has said will start this month. The speaker has said he hopes to put a reconciliation bill on his chamber’s floor by the beginning of April.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico Monday that he didn’t intend to put an amended House budget resolution on the Senate floor until late March at the earliest—after the March 14 deadline to pass a separate, but equally difficult, funding measure and avoid a government shutdown.

With both chambers adopting their opening bids for a budget resolution, talks on a deal for a compromise remain behind closed doors. In the meantime, the more pressing government-funding debate has taken center stage. The challenge of avoiding a shutdown will take up much of the political oxygen, and possibly Senate floor time, until it’s resolved.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole told reporters Tuesday that members were close on completing a stopgap bill free of most extraneous provisions, known as a “clean” continuing resolution. Text could come as soon as this weekend.

Most Democrats are unlikely to support the measure. They are pressing for language that would restrict Trump’s ability to ignore congressionally appropriated spending. That’s a nonstarter for Republicans, but the question gripping Capitol Hill is whether that standoff would trigger a shutdown, given that the GOP might need as many as a half-dozen Democratic votes to counterbalance hard-line Republican lawmakers who oppose any CR.

“So do you really think a Republican House and a Republican Senate is going to send language that limits a Republican president—by the way, his name is Donald Trump—and expect him to sign it?” Cole asked Tuesday.