Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will brief Republican senators Wednesday about moving first on a budget resolution to lay the groundwork for a package focused on border security, energy and defense that could pass the Senate with a simple majority while House Republicans remain deadlocked on how to move forward.
Graham and other Republican senators are eager to get started on phase one of Trump’s agenda by moving a budget reconciliation package that would include about $100 billion in funding to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, reforms to expand oil and gas drilling and a substantial plus-up in defense spending.
Their plan would move legislation to extend the expiring 2017 tax cuts in a second budget reconciliation package later this year.
Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said that House Republicans “right now” are “not able to move at the level we’d like them to move.”
“We do have a bill ready to go here and Sen. Graham is going to be briefing the conference on that tomorrow at lunch,” Barrasso.
House Republicans this week were forced to delay an initial vote on their version of the legislation amid jockeying among Republicans over how deep the spending cuts it should include.
Barrasso said Senate Republicans will head to Florida this weekend and will meet with President Trump Friday night to gauge his interest in the Senate moving before the House on a budget reconciliation package to enact at least half of his legislative agenda.
He said GOP senators will “see if he’d like us to move forward” on a package focused on border security, energy and defense.
The Wyoming senator said Graham will update GOP colleagues “on where he is in terms of putting together the budget for the reconciliation.”
“What he’s been working on, of course, is … the immediacy of border security, energy security, defense, national security. Those parts of things,” he said.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), however, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the plan is still for the House, not the Senate, to move forward on a budget package that would encompass border security, energy, defense and tax legislation.
“The Senate will not take the lead. We’ll take the lead. We’re right on schedule,” he said.
Johnson noted that he will meet with Republican members of the House Budget Committee Tuesday evening to discuss a path forward.
“It's not yet determined whether we'll be marking up this week or not,” he said. “We're having an important meeting tonight with key figures on the committee and others to sort through it. But this is the deliberative process.”
“We're well within the margins of time that we have to work on and I'm very optimistic about it. We've made a lot of progress,” he said.
A source familiar with the House schedule told The Hill Tuesday that the budget resolution would be delayed in the House.
“There will not be a budget resolution markup this week,” the source said. “Leadership provided an ambitious timeline, and the House is doing the best it can to meet that.”
Source link
