‘Spinning Our Wheels’: Republican Agenda Struggles To Get Off The Ground

WASHINGTON — It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Congressional Republicans were hoping to quickly approve Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda and confirm his Cabinet nominees within days of him taking office, helping to fulfill his many campaign promises and lay the foundation for an ambitious second term.

With Trump’s inauguration quickly approaching, however, Republicans in the House and Senate are still bickering over how to proceed in crafting legislation for border security, the military, the energy industry and a massive package of tax cuts. In the House, 218 votes are required to pass legislation and the GOP currently has 219 sitting members, making passage of any major budget bill a headache.

Meanwhile, several of Trump’s nominees to top administrative positions face uncertain prospects of getting confirmed by the Senate, while others are facing delays that threaten to spoil the president-elect’s demands for a flurry of confirmations on Day 1 of his presidency.

When it comes to lawmaking, the big question for Republicans is whether to pass a quick border and energy bill that would give Trump some early legislative wins or take more time and pass one giant bill that includes tax cuts, which are more complicated and politically trickier.

No Republican — including Trump himself — seems to want to make the call, leading to frustration from some GOP senators who believe the party is wasting time fussing.

“I’m for accomplishing our goal and we’re not even working on it right now,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “We’re just spinning our wheels.”

Asked about one idea floated by some Republicans of starting to work on one giant legislative package and reverting to splitting it into two pieces if the party members can’t agree on it, Cornyn was dismissive, calling it a “recipe for failure.”

Trump, for his part, seems bored by the debate, and wants congressional Republicans to figure it out.

“Whether it’s one bill or two bills, it’s going to get done one way or the other,” Trump said Wednesday during a visit to the Capitol. “I think there’s a lot of talk about two and there’s a lot of talk about one, but it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same. We’re going to get something done that’s going to be reducing taxes and creating a lot of jobs and all of the other things.”

In order to unlock the special “budget reconciliation” process that will allow them to make law without facing a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, Republicans need to pass a budget resolution in both the House and Senate outlining their tax and spending numbers. That means they have to know at the outset whether taxes are part of the package. After both chambers adopt the resolution, then they can get to work on writing the actual legislation.

The most outspoken advocate for the one-bill approach has been House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the overseer of tax policy in the House, where there are several Republicans from Democratic states demanding a higher limit on federal tax deductions for state and local tax payments, also known as the SALT cap — a potential major sticking point for a tax bill. Accommodating those members could make the tax bill even more expensive than the trillions of dollars it’s already expected to cost.

“We have to find some kind of reasonable cap, because we cannot lose one member in the House of Representatives,” Smith said on Fox Business this week. “And I’ll tell you, there’s a whole lot more than one member that cares about the SALT cap.”

If the tax bill is combined with border security and energy deregulation, it could be harder for those pushing for a higher limit on the SALT cap to hold things up.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the point man on taxes for Senate Republicans, told HuffPost he hasn’t taken sides on whether to lump taxes in with everything else. He said he understands arguments for each approach, including the idea of getting “wins on the table” with a border bill and addressing taxes later.

“It’s phenomenally complicated,” Crapo said of the tax code.

Trump is likely to have some early successes with several of his top Cabinet nominees, who are likely to be confirmed during his first week in office. Those include nominations with bipartisan support like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to lead the State Department, John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA, and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Other nominees with less bipartisan support could also be confirmed within days of Trump’s swearing-in, including for the posts of attorney general, deputy attorney general and FBI director.

But former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s controversial picks to serve as director of national intelligence and secretary of health and human services, respectively, could be in trouble. Both nominees face skeptical GOP senators who have yet to announce their support for the confirmations.

Under pressure from Trump to confirm as many nominees as possible this month, some Republican committee chairs have scheduled confirmation hearings before key documents like a background check or an ethics report has been submitted to the Senate. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, for example, this week posted notices of hearings for two Trump nominees over the objections of panel Democrats, who said they had not yet received their paperwork.

“What are Republicans trying to hide when they don’t want their nominees to have background checks and don’t want to have full information about them?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked on Thursday.