Senator Graham, from his perch as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is steamrolling his House colleagues as he tries to get underway the first pillar of President Trump’s legislative agenda. His new budget items could be on the president’s desk in a matter of weeks, all while the House process becomes more and more dysfunctional by the day. 

Welcome to Washington, where just last week Mr. Graham successfully shepherded a budget resolution through his committee — a resolution that called on three Senate Committees to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars in additional funding for border security, deportation operations, and investments in America’s military. To counter that, other committee leaders will be tasked with finding deficit reduction measures to balance out the more than $300 billion in additional spending, which would be doled out over the course of the next four years.  

Mr. Graham moved quickly to secure his position as the top dog in this budget fight. When Speaker Johnson promised to get his own budget language through committee by the first week of February only to later miss that deadline, the South Carolina senator announced that same day that his own committee would have its work done by the end of the following week. 

Mr. Johnson was not pleased. “I’m afraid it’s a non-starter over here, and I’ve expressed that to him,” Mr. Johnson told reporters last week. “There’s just different ideas on how to get there, and I’ve told my good friend Lindsey that I have to manage the House in the best and only way it can be managed.”

Within minutes, reporters descended on Mr. Graham, who at that moment was walking to Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch meeting in the Capitol. He refused to answer questions, but announced he would speak to reporters at a press conference following the meeting with his colleagues. Two hours later, he came out and told House Republicans, politely, that he didn’t care what they thought or what they did. 

“To my friends in the House: We’re moving because we have to,” Mr. Graham said alongside Senate Republican leadership. “I wish you the best. I want one big, beautiful bill, but I cannot and I will not go back to South Carolina and justify not supporting the president’s immigration plan.”

“We’re not building a wall, folks. We’re hitting a wall,” he emphasized. 

House Republicans scrambled, trying desperately to catch up with Mr. Graham. Without notice or any details about what may be in the budget resolution, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Jodey Arrington, declared in a closed-door meeting that he would bring up his resolution by the end of the week.

It ended up looking similar to Mr. Graham’s bill, except for one key difference — Mr. Arrington’s resolution included an authorization for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, something deficit and debt hawks like Congressman Thomas Massie and Congressman Tim Burchett have warned may be too much for the country to handle. 

Messrs. Graham and Arrington both got their respective resolutions out of their committees on Thursday of this past week, which means it will now be on the other committees to lay out their plans for the new spending bill. 

The House, however, won’t be returning to Washington this week. Senate Republicans on the other hand plan to be here to vote on the president’s cabinet nominees and continue work on the legislative agenda, likely putting Mr. Johnson and his House colleagues even farther behind Mr. Graham in this race. 

It has gotten so bad for House Republicans on the Hill in recent weeks that even reporters are joking about it to members’ faces. When Mr. Johnson and his leadership team took to the podium in the studio beneath the Capitol complex last week for a press event, the chairwoman of the Republican Conference, Congresswoman Lisa McClain, went to the microphone and lamented the fact that Washington hadn’t gotten snow the previous week. 

“We were supposed to get a bunch of snow last week and we didn’t,” Ms. McClain said. 

“We were supposed to get a budget last week, too,” one reporter replied.