Speaker Mike Johnson left a closed-door meeting at the White House with congressional leadership on Tuesday sounding confident in his plan to execute Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda.
At last, Johnson suggested to reporters, Republicans had settled the heated debate on whether to pursue one or two major legislative packages. GOP lawmakers would bundle everything, from tax policy revisions to border security crackdowns to energy reforms, into one massive bill and then pass it through budget reconciliation.
That’s what he and Trump have spent weeks lobbying for, and that’s what Johnson’s leadership team said Congress would pursue.
“We do have a strategy that we’re all working on together,” Johnson told reporters. “It will be bicameral, and there’s a lot of excitement about that.”
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So confident was Johnson that when asked if leadership still needs to hammer out any details, he said no. “Actually, we got a plan pretty well formulated now,” he added.
But the united front fell apart quickly.
Within minutes, Senate Majority Leader John Thune — a steadfast supporter of the two-bill approach — gave reporters the opposite readout from the White House meeting.
Thune described the gathering to reporters as an exchange of “a lot of great theories,” signaling that the GOP’s reconciliation strategy is no settled matter.
As Johnson and Thune’s strategic disagreement persists, lawmakers on both sides of the issue who were optimistic that leadership would find a resolution on Tuesday are starting to sweat a key logistical matter: time.
“Time is flying,” conservative Rep. Keith Self told NOTUS. “And our matrix is so complex.”
Self is right that Republicans have an ambitious, and complicated, to-do list. Trump wants major legislative wins on border security, energy and defense in his first 100 days. Government funding runs out on March 15. The debt ceiling expires this summer. Portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire at the end of the year.
“I don’t think the cake is in the oven,” Rep. Mark Amodei told NOTUS of the reconciliation process, “much less almost baked.”
“Full speed ahead should be the order of the day with all that stuff going on,” he added.
While Thune and Johnson didn’t seem to reach an agreement, a source familiar with the White House meeting said the discussion was not “adversarial” or “confrontational.”
The source added that when it comes to reconciliation, Trump has “a vision” but cares more about the outcome than the process.
“Here’s where we’re at today. Here’s where I want to be. You all figure out how I get from point A to point B,” the source said of Trump’s style.
But if Thune thinks Johnson is going to budge on the single bill, House Republicans thought the Senate majority leader was in for a rude awakening.
“It’s very much settled in the House,” Rep. Max Miller told NOTUS. “It doesn’t seem like it’s settled in the chamber right next to us.”
“The timeline is going to be very tight,” he said.
Despite some optimism that House Republicans are on the same page, conservatives are still pitching a two-step reconciliation plan. That’s a potential problem for Johnson, as other conservatives recently made clear in their vote against his speakership that they’re willing to play hardball.
Self, at least, acknowledged to NOTUS that the two-bill plan still has legs.
“It’s alive,” he said.
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.
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