Republicans’ Third Budget Reconciliation Bill Clears First Hurdle as Conservatives Withhold Judgment

Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leaders scored their first win of the third reconciliation fight on Thursday, as the Budget Committee passed a resolution to kick off the process. If all works out for the GOP, nearly $100 billion will be spent on things like military and intelligence capabilities, aid for farmers, and an attempt to force states to institute voter ID laws.If successful, it would mark the first time that lawmakers have ever been able to pass three reconciliation bills on party-line votes in a single Congress. Many have concerns that the military investments amid the conflict with Iran could be tone-deaf heading into the midterms, while fiscal conservatives say every penny of new spending must be offset by cuts elsewhere. “We’re going to use reconciliation because we’re not going to let our troops be held hostage,” the chairman of the Budget Committee, Congressman Jodey Arrington, said at the markup hearing on Thursday. Mr. Arrington, who authored all three such budget resolutions in the last 18 months, is hoping to get the annual military budget as close to $1.5 trillion as possible, as President Trump wants. Under the regular appropriations process, Democrats are willing to accept about $1.15 trillion this year. About $70 billion of the almost $100 billion in the new reconciliation bill would go for military spending. The top Democrat on the committee, Congressman Brendan Boyle, likened the budget resolution push to something he used to do with his daughter when she was a young child. “I would love to read her fairytale stories, and I would try to come up with just the most imaginative, wildest, most creative fairytale I could come up with. Mr. Chairman, I’ll give you credit — the fairytale you just told was so imaginative, I could never come up with something as wild,” Mr. Boyle joked. Mr. Johnson hopes to pass the budget resolution by next week before he and his colleagues go on their six-week summer recess. Once lawmakers return to work in mid-September, they’re expected to work for only two or three weeks before heading home to campaign. Once that happens, they will not return to Washington before the midterm elections. The problem for Mr. Johnson is that many conservative budget hawks aren’t willing to go along with the process at this time. The resolution that Mr. Arrington will bring to the floor essentially directs other committees to begin drafting their own respective elements of what will be the final reconciliation package. The resolution currently includes no authorization for tax increases or spending cuts, meaning that inevitably, the bill will increase the size of the deficit.“There is no will to spend less or honestly pay for massive spending. Deficits, Debt, and Debasement all the way to the crash site. Nothing stops this train. Make a plan,” Congressman Warren Davidson wrote of the reconciliation bill on Wednesday. Congressman Thomas Massie, another spending hawk, has indicated that he, too, is a no on the resolution. In the Senate, some are also signaling opposition to the third reconciliation bill as written. Senator Bill Cassidy, who lost his GOP primary to a Trump-backed challenger earlier this year, says he isn’t voting for anything until there is a guarantee that every spending increase is offset by a cut elsewhere. “Our national debt is a runaway train. The next reconciliation bill should be fully paid for,” Dr. Cassidy wrote in a brief statement Thursday. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the current text of the budget resolution will clearly result in a larger federal budget deficit.“To require no offsets in this budget is baffling,” the president of the CRFB, Maya MacGuineas, said in a statement Thursday. “The only way to ensure reconciliation does not add to deficits is to require commensurate deficit decreases in the budget resolution. The federal government is projected to spend more than $78 trillion before interest costs over the next decade, and Congress cannot bring itself to find 0.1% of that total to cut or any revenue to raise?”

Republicans’ Third Budget Reconciliation Bill Clears First Hurdle as Conservatives Withhold Judgment

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