A key vote to advance a massive conservative policy bill has been delayed, putting House Republicans behind in their ambitious schedule to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda. The House Budget Committee had initially aimed to go through and approve the legislation this week, but according to a source familiar with planning that is no longer the case.
It comes after conservatives on the panel rejected multiple offers by House GOP leaders on where to set a baseline for cutting federal spending, urging senior Republicans to seek deeper cuts ahead of negotiations with the Senate.
“I guess they want to get the resolution out. I do, too. I want to get it out of committee, have an up or down vote. But if you set that floor too low, that’s all that’s going to be achieved,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who sits on the House Budget Committee, told Fox News Digital on Monday. “I have no confidence that they would exceed whatever level we put in there.”
Norman is one of several members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus who sits on the budget committee.
With just a razor-thin majority in the House – and by extension, on committees – Republicans can afford dissent from just one or two members to pass anything along party lines. It’s a significant hurdle facing the GOP as they seek to use their House and Senate majorities to pass a sweeping conservative policy overhaul via the budget reconciliation process.
By lowering the threshold for Senate passage from 60 votes to 51 out of 100, the maneuver allows the party in power to skirt its opposition to advance its agenda – provided the items included relate to budgetary and other fiscal matters. The House of Representatives already has a simple majority threshold.
Republicans are hoping to use reconciliation to pass a broad swath of Trump’s policy goals, from more funding at the border to removing taxes on tipped and overtime wages. But conservatives have also demanded that any reconciliation bill also reduce the national deficit by pairing new spending with extreme cuts in federal dollars going elsewhere.
The first step in the reconciliation process is getting the bill through Congress’ budget committees, which then directs other committees to find areas for cuts and policy changes under their specific jurisdictions.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said that guidelines for spending cuts would be a “floor” not a “ceiling.”
GOP leaders initially presented what amounted to a $300 billion floor for cuts, paired with $325 billion in new defense and border spending. Conservatives later rejected another offer that amounted to a rough total of $900 billion in spending cuts, with about $300 billion in new spending.
Norman said he wanted the floor set to $2 trillion or $3 trillion.
Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., another Freedom Caucus member on the budget panel, said he was optimistic about reaching a deal, but that there were “a lot of conversations about starting the process from the most conservative position possible.”
“The Senate is not as interested in fiscal responsibility, so we recognize the need to set parameters for authorizing committees that encourage that… from the beginning,” Cline said Monday.
Johnson said he wanted the bill to advance through committee this week with a goal of passing an initial House version by the end of February.
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