Trump has a narrow window to advance his aggressive agenda. He’ll need these right-wing hardliners to push it through
Analysis: Trump is angling to dismantle the hurdles that sapped his first-term momentum by calling all corners of the GOP to him
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Your support makes all the difference.We’re less than two weeks out from the initial sprint of the second Trump administration — and the incoming president is now seeking to push aside one of his biggest hurdles.
In the clearest sign yet that Donald Trump is serious about pursuing an aggressive legislative agenda in his first year in office, he is taking an active role in managing the future of the House Republican Conference. Where once he was at arm’s length of Republican congressional leadership, Trump has leaned in to his role as leader of the GOP and now casts a long shadow over the House and Senate Republican conferences.
His role in the House has become something of a babysitter. As the chamber met last week to formally elect a speaker, the incoming president — all the way from Mar-a-Lago — remained intimately involved in shutting down any attempts to organize resistance against Mike Johnson, the incumbent. Two holdouts, Keith Self and Ralph Norman, were contacted repeatedly by Trump during the debate over Johnson’s re-election, though they and their colleagues disputed that Trump’s calls were the deciding factor.
At the same time, he made very clear to Johnson with a late-game endorsement that his support hinges on delivering wins for the president’s team and toeing the line on policy and process matters.
Regardless of how much pull the incoming president actually has over GOP members of the House or even the Senate, which varies by individual, the message from Mar-a-Lago is clear: The president plans to run the show.
His next move is aimed at making sure the same Republicans who have caused headaches for Johnson over the past year do not remain a problem in the first year of his presidency, which is typically the most productive.
News outlets reported this week that the president-elect is gathering Republicans in leadership as well as in key caucuses like the conservative Freedom Caucus to his Florida estate for meetings ahead of his inauguration on January 20.
He’ll also be in Washington on Wednesday for the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, and will meet that day with members of the Senate Republican caucus, now led by John Thune.
This all comes as Republicans are plotting their first big legislative move: a massive budget and tax bill set to be passed through the reconciliation process which will include an extension of the 2017 GOP tax platform. The bill will require unified Republican caucuses in the Senate and House in particular to pass, a difficult prospect given their differences over some tax and spending issues including SALT deductions.
Thune, a McConnell acolyte whose election to majority leader in the Senate is a sign of the caucus’s residual institutionalist bent, has also cautioned in recent days that the president-elect will need to temper his expectations for a deportation program with what is “realistic,” a sign that another battle could be approaching.
More than anything else, what Trump really wants is to avoid the humiliation of his defeat on the issue of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans tried and failed to do away with in 2017. That historic Senate vote by John McCain (along with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski) dooming the GOP bill, which already was set to leave large parts of the Act intact, sapped the White House’s political capital and contributed to the administration’s failure to pass any major policies through Congress before the Democrats retook power in the 2018 elections.
Republicans, especially Trump’s team, are wary of the fact that the razor-thin margin in the House makes it very possible, even likely, that the Democrats will retake control in the next election cycle.
“He understands the enormity of the situation and the unique opportunity we have right now,” Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma told CNN yesterday. “What he also understands is, we don’t have the gift of time.”
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