Congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump scored a big win on April 10 when the House voted for the Senate’s budget framework 216 to 214. Big? It was ’uge, as the president sometimes puts it.
Here’s why. It means the 2017 tax cuts are likely to be renewed, not expire at the end of the year, thus avoiding a $4.5 trillion tax hike. This means more economic growth, more thriving businesses, more plentiful jobs, and more voters seeing conservative governance working for the good of the nation.
Republicans can, as a result, push their priorities for revenue and spending levels through Congress on bare majorities rather than attempting the impossible task of finding seven Senate Democrats to vote with them in order to save the legislation from being killed by a filibuster.
Victory on April 10 was a 180-degree turnaround from GOP doom, which seemed likely earlier in the week. Credit for this dramatic change of fortune goes to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) perhaps more than to anyone else.
After an expected House vote was canceled on the evening of April 9 because more than a dozen GOP fiscal hawks were going to vote “no,” Thune met and talked with them, reassured them that he would fight hard for fiscal sanity in the Senate, and won them over. The legitimate fear among those who want the United States to stop recklessly living trillions of dollars a year beyond its means was that centrist senators would block meaningful spending cuts once they get down to putting real numbers into spending plans in committee.
But Thune did a masterful job of persuading this corps of budget cutters that the $4 billion of cuts in the Senate blueprint, which seemed not merely pointless but derisory, was meaningless and put there simply to make sure the bill passed the upper chamber and that the reconciliation process — filibuster-proof spending legislation — could proceed. It was a holding number, not a real goal.
All but two of the hawks were persuaded. They walked over into the “yes” column so that by the next afternoon, Republicans were singing from the same hymn sheet.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke after the victory and made it clear he was “grateful to Leader Thune” for making sure that the party is able to have a “one team approach” not only to the fiscal challenges facing the country but to much else of the president’s agenda, such as border security and a buildup of the military. Trump “didn’t have to call a single member” of Congress to get the legislation over the line, Johnson said. Keeping the presidential powder dry may prove important, as it will be needed later this year to muscle through the actual spending and tax cuts.
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Thune’s reassurance: “We’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter, not only making our federal government more fiscally sustainable, but also deficit reduction.”
Congress will start putting real numbers into the spending framework after it returns from the Easter recess. Then, Thune must get some of his gourmandizing colleagues to agree to go on a fiscal diet.
