Molly Reynolds (35:05)
It is worth remembering that even as the executive branch itself is implementing a sort of maximalist strategy of destabilization across the federal government, that to the extent that there are things that do actually require congressional action, like adopting a budget resolution that would set up the ability to move subsequent legislation without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, that's important to say that because that's sort of why we're talking about this at all there we are seeing Republicans in Congress struggle with coming to an agreement on how they want to proceed. And so you should have asked whether this is a win for Mike Johnson. I mean, it's certainly a win in comparison to it not passing, which did in fact look like it was a possibility when they did adopt it. They had scheduled the vote, they announced that they were canceling the vote. They sent everyone home and then they announced that they were un cancelling the vote and told everyone to come back. And so as I said at the time, this had real like 2017 vibes for anyone who had the great pleasure of living through the fits and starts and ultimate failure of Republicans attempt to repeal the Affordable care Act in 2017. Real similar energy to various stages of that process. And so again, if you if the sort of barometer here is are Republicans moving the ball down the field, then yes, like this was a victory for Mike Johnson. Certainly there's a. I think often for Republicans in Congress, there's sort of a psychological element where when they do things that they have been told by the mainstream media that they aren't going to be able to do that, like that, that's seen as a psychological win for the conference. And so there's some element of that as well. But I can't stress enough the differences between what the Senate has laid out for how it wants to proceed and what the House has laid out for how it wants to proceed. And it may well be the case that folks in the House, Mike Johnson, Jason Smith, who's the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is the one with jurisdiction over tax policy, it may well be the case that those folks go to the Senate and say, look, this is the best we can do. Literally this. It was like pulling teeth to get this through the chamber. We can't. If you come back to us with a different plan, there's no way we're going to get that through through the House. So you just have to eat what we've sent you. That's a possibility. The real challenge to that approach, if you are House Republicans, is that one of the things that House Republicans have put in this spending blueprint is very, very large cuts to Medicaid. Now, if you followed this at all last week and you listened to any congressional Republicans, they will have told you the word Medicaid does not appear in the budget resolution. That is technically true. But the way that this works is that the budget resolution, when you are using a budget resolution to tee up future reconciliation legislation, has instructions to different congressional committees, and it says this committee has to cut this amount from the deficit or this committee can report out language that increases the deficit by this much. In the House budget resolution, there's an instruction to the House Energy and Commerce Committee to achieve cuts of $880 billion. There is mathematically no way for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to satisfy that instruction without making really substantial cuts to Medicaid. There are House Republicans who are nervous about this possibility, and to a greater degree, there are Senate Republicans who are nervous about this possibility, particularly folks who represent states that have chosen to expand Medicaid in the almost 15 years since the passage of the Affordable Care act, and also just Republicans who represent states with large Medicaid populations. And so the idea of getting the Senate to sign off on cuts of this size. There's a challenge there. At the same time, if you go back to the House and say, and the Senate says we can only pass something with smaller cuts, then you start to lose those folks in the House who are really hard to get to vote for the House's budget resolution in the first place, because they don't think that the cuts that are in the House's budget resolution are big enough. And so this is a very hard circle to square. It's also the case that one of the big issues for the Senate in kind of legislating for the rest of the year is the question of whether to make the Trump tax cuts permanent, which is not something that's sort of contemplated by the House's budget resolution. This is part of why the Senate the whole time has wanted to do one reconciliation bill now that basically just increases spending in some areas, like defense spending, spending on border enforcement, and then punts till later in the year. The really hard task of writing a tax bill and the sort of effective deadline for writing a tax bill is the end of the calendar year, because that's when the tax provisions in the 2017 tax cuts start to expire. So the Senate would like to sort of take the tax piece and say, we're going to do that later. It's going to be hard. We really want to make the tax cuts permanent. We probably got to do some budget gimmickry to make that happen. Maybe the parliamentarian will say no to that, but we really want to save that fight for later, and we really just want to watch notch a big win now. We want to pass a smaller first reconciliation bill that increases spending, and we don't really want now at least to get into this fight with the House about these really big spending cuts. Again, there are senators, Republican senators, who would be very happy to cut $880 billion from Medicaid, but I don't think they have the votes to do that, or at least it's not clear to me that they have the votes to do that. And so while, again, we've gotten, like, marginally closer to the finish line, and better for Mike Johnson to have gotten marginally closer than to still be at the starting line, there's just a real, a real big challenge here. And, and the last thing I'll say is that this is a place where eventually Trump is going to be important, as you said, Scott, we saw in the House when the House did adopt its budget resolution. Reporting suggests that Trump was important in getting those last couple of votes on board. But sort of cutting these kinds of complicated legislative deals is not Trump's strong suit. It's not quite clear to me like, who was going to be the administration's point person on negotiating these sorts of things and like helping Republicans come to agreement on these sorts of things. In the first Trump administration, it was Steve Mnuchin who less so on, say, like the ACA stuff. But in later rounds of congressional negotiations around things like the debt limit, he was often the lead administration negotiator. But it's just not clear to me who that's going to be. And at some point, if they want to be able to bridge these divisions within the House Republican Conference, they're probably going to need Trump's help to do that. But Trump is, particularly in the context of dealing with Congress, quite susceptible to just doing the last thing that someone told him. And it's not clear to me that that's going to be sufficient to help to help Trump help Republicans solve some of these debates.
