Thune lays out plan for separate border and tax reconciliation bills

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) laid out an ambitious plan at the Senate Republican retreat Tuesday for Congress to move first next year on a budget reconciliation package that would be focused on border security and defense and then act later in the year on a second reconciliation package to extend the expiring Trump-era tax cuts.

Thune presented the plan at a half-day meeting of the Senate GOP conference at the Library of Congress, to which President-elect Trump called in to urge Republican lawmakers to act swiftly and decisively on his agenda.

While a top priority is extending the Trump tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of next year, Thune is proposing that Senate Republicans act first on a proposal to secure the border and raise defense spending, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

“We’re going to do multiple packages. We’re not just going to do one reconciliation,” said a Republican senator who participated in the meeting. “The discussion right now really is do we do one on the border first and do we come back and do the tax extensions and relief because of the complexity of the tax [package].”

The senator said the emerging consensus within the Republican conference is to “get on the border right away” by using a budget reconciliation package to provide funding for completing construction of Trump’s border wall and to provide more funding for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Republican senators say Thune has also floated the idea of converting discretionary defense spending into mandatory spending and passing it under the budget reconciliation process.

That maneuver would protect an increase in defense funding from bipartisan negotiations over the top-line spending limits for the 12 annual appropriations bills.

Democrats have traditionally demanded that increases in defense spending be matched by proportionate increases in non-defense social spending.

By converting a chunk of defense spending into mandatory spending and passing it under the protection of the budget reconciliation process, it allows Republicans to keep the discretionary defense spending at a lower level without cutting into military readiness.

Republicans are also looking at proposals to expand domestic energy protection to include in the first budgetary reconciliation package.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Senate Republicans would try to pass a border security package under budget reconciliation in the first 30 days of Trump’s second term.

“We’ll give it a whirl,” he said of the accelerated timeline. “I think we want to start out with getting that border secure.

“We want to help lower energy costs, we want to help the military. We want to hit the ground running,” he added.

Advancing legislation as part of a budget reconciliation package would allow Republicans to avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. 

Budget reconciliation bills may be passed with a simple majority in the upper chamber, but the Byrd Rule requires that the items included have a non-tangential impact on spending, revenues or the deficit. 

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