At the starting line?
Things do NOT look good for passage with stuff Trump wants…..
Time and circumstances ARE working against passage…..
Oh?
And a Midterm Election in a little more than 90 days…..
Getting a $95 billion budget blueprint through the House took weeks of arm twisting. Getting it through the Senate may very well be impossible.
With Speaker Mike Johnson muscling through the first step of a two-part plan for passing billions of funding for the Iran war and farm aid — and for implementing provisions of a GOP election proposal — the intraparty battle is officially now in Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s court, where the South Dakota Republican has been frank about the rocky road the effort faces and careful not to guarantee he’ll be successful.
GOP senators are likely to face a wave of pressure from House Republicans, who are leaving town this week for an extended summer recess, as well as the White House, to move quickly to advance the House’s budget resolution — necessary to draft and pass the party’s third filibuster-skirting reconciliation bill of the 119th Congress.
The White House blasted out a video Wednesday night of President Donald Trump telling supporters to “call John Thune” to demand passage of the SAVE America Act, adding that Republicans were trying to fit it into the reconciliation package.
But there’s plenty of skepticism among Republicans that they will be successful — before the midterms, or ever. Fiscal hawks are demanding offsets, while defense hawks and farm-state Republicans want more spending for their priorities.
“I don’t think Senator Thune’s going to take it up,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters Wednesday.
And attempting to pass another party-line package could end up forcing vulnerable incumbents to walk the plank on any number of politically tricky votes just months before the elections — a scenario many want to avoid.
Complicating things even further is that, with Sen. Mitch McConnell absent indefinitely for health reasons, Thune can only lose two of his members and still secure the budget blueprint’s adoption, given unified opposition from Democrats. This reality left several Republicans questioning whether the whole effort was DOA before the measure could formally reach the Senate.
Outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), in an interview, pointed to McConnell’s absence and the pushback from corners of the conference, adding, “I don’t know whether the votes are [there] for a reconciliation bill in the Senate.”
The Senate will be in town for two more weeks before they leave for their own August recess, and GOP leaders are not at this point committing to trying to advance the resolution before they break for the month. Instead, Thune this week said he would hold the budget resolution in reserve until the government is funded ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline to avoid a shutdown.
But if they punt it until the fall, Republicans are also skeptical they would advance the budget resolution when they return in September given the even closer proximity of the midterms, according to two people granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Asked Wednesday how close he was to having the 50 votes necessary to proceed on the Senate floor, Thune quipped: “Good question.”
Instead, Senate GOP leaders are focused, for now, on trying to get the government funded before the shutdown deadline, with ongoing bipartisan talks in the Senate around a possible deal for moving a short-term continuing resolution…..
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.