Senate Republicans easily pushed their budget resolution out of committee on Wednesday — the first step toward being able to enact President Donald Trump’s massive domestic policy agenda.
The Senate Budget Committee voted 11-10, along party lines, to approve the fiscal framework meant to tee up a package of energy, border security and defense policy through the partisan budget reconciliation process. Across the Capitol, House GOP leaders struggled at the same time to rally their own around a far more expansive plan that would pave the way for legislation that would bundle those same policies alongside trillions of dollars in tax cuts. The House Budget Committee’s fiscal blueprint is teed up for a markup on Thursday morning.
Republicans in both chambers will eventually need to unite around one budget blueprint to even be able to vote on a bill that isn’t subject to the Senate filibuster — the only way they’ll be able to advance Trump’s most ambitious priorities in a narrowly divided Congress. But on Wednesday night, Senate Republicans celebrated an initial victory of advancing their framework for a slimmer bill, designed to move independently of a larger measure that would aim to extend expiring tax cuts passed during the president’s first term in office.
The Senate budget markup, which lasted all day, is the first legislative step in the arduous reconciliation process. And Democrats deluging the meeting with more than 45 amendments is a preview of the minority party’s likely tactics on the floor, once Republicans are ready for the all-night “vote-a-rama” that precedes both the floor vote on the budget resolution and then the reconciliation bill itself.
Democrats offered a panoply of amendments on fiscal issues, including ones aimed at undercutting the plans of Republicans in the other chamber to cut spending by $1.5 trillion over a decade to help offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts.
“We’ve heard rumors, and we’ve seen lists floating around — including material from the House earlier today — about potential cuts that our Republican colleagues are planning to use to pay for this additional border and defense spending, as well as for the tax cuts,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said during the Senate markup. “And they’re very heavy on cuts to programs that help Americans access health care.”
To add context to what those cuts mean for real people, Kaine proposed an amendment to the Senate budget that would stop lawmakers from cutting health care coverage without an official estimate of how many Americans would be affected.
Senate Republicans defeated that proposal by ruling it out of order. Urging opposition to the amendment, Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued that it would “unnecessarily slow down consideration for legislation” and “jeopardize” Republicans’ ability to use the filibuster-skirting reconciliation process.
Republicans also defeated an amendment from the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, that would zero out GOP lawmaker’s plans to enact new spending through the party-line process, including $150 billion in military funding. That would force lawmakers to debate the funding through the regular appropriations process, which requires bipartisan buy-in.
“It’s just to say we should all work together on a bipartisan basis,” Murray said, adding that the funding “should be part of the topline” conversations that appropriators are having now to negotiate overall totals for military and non-defense programs ahead of the March 14 government shutdown deadline.
But Graham argued that Republicans don’t want to match any increases to defense spending increase with boosts to domestic funding, a consistent demand Democrats make in funding negotiations.
But Republicans don’t want to match their defense spending increase with the domestic funding demands of their Democratic counterparts, Graham countered.
“We can actually help the Defense Department that is underfunded, and we don’t have to come up with $171 billion for non-defense spending,” Graham said. “That’s why we’re doing reconciliation — to break that cycle to the extent we can.
