The White House Wants the Megabill by July 4. For Real.
House and Senate Republicans spent Thursday at each other's throats over President Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.' The sparring between the two chambers reached a point where members were openly scoffing at the GOP's self-imposed July 4 deadline for passing the bill.
Down Pennsylvania Avenue, meanwhile, the White House isn't sweating. In fact, Trump's aides are downright bullish about getting the megabill wrapped up in a bow for a presidential signature by Independence Day.
'We are targeting the week of July 4 for final passage,' said one of two Trump administration officials I spoke to Wednesday and granted anonymity to candidly describe the private talks.
Let's be clear: The timeline is extraordinarily fast. Not only does Senate Majority Leader John Thune have to find a way to bridge competing demands inside his conference and weather a grueling amendment 'vote-a-rama,' but he also has to work with Speaker Mike Johnson, who is already groaning at every change being entertained for the bill that barely passed his chamber last month.
Traditionally, getting the two chambers aligned on a single piece of complicated legislation means weeks of 'conferencing' — that's what happened in 2017, the last time Republicans pursued a party-line tax bill. This time, the legislation is even more complicated and the margins even thinner.
But White House officials are adamant that GOP leaders skip that step. Nor do they want the House making more changes after the Senate, requiring another 'pingpong' back across the Rotunda. They expect the Senate to clear a bill that the House can simply plop on the floor, pass and send to Trump's desk.
'There's not going to be a pingpong or a conference,' the official told me yesterday.
Can they really do that in just three weeks? Some Republicans are skeptical, to say the least. Sen. John Curtis of Utah said 'a lot of us would be surprised' if the July 4 deadline holds at the POLITICO Energy Summit Tuesday.
And during a Punchbowl News event Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said that while the Senate might be able to finish on time, it could take another month to negotiate with the House. 'The Senate is going to do what it damn well wants to do,' he said.
OK, senator: Go tell that to Donald Trump.
Some of the president's allies on the Hill are already dreaming up a snazzy Rose Garden celebration to ring in both Independence Day and the enactment of the 'big, beautiful bill.' (At least that's what one well-placed GOP congressional aide predicted to me this week.)
The recent history of the megabill is fueling the administration's confidence. Political prognosticators scoffed at Johnson's self-imposed Memorial Day target for House passage, predicting the warring factions in his conference would make that deadline an impossibility.
But Trump swooped in and muscled the bill through by sheer force, strong-arming moderate holdouts and bringing conservatives to heel. And White House officials are sure he can do it again.
Administration aides are well aware of the work left to be done. Senate Republicans are already moving to throw a major wrench in the negotiations by upending two key provisions that were essential to winning the support of rival blocs in the House.
Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo told his colleagues Wednesday he plans to deliver on a personal priority that's highly desired by members of his panel: making key business tax breaks permanent. To do it, he's ready to scale back the House's $40,000 cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction — a key factor in winning the support of blue-state GOP holdouts.
And to manage desires elsewhere in the Senate GOP, Crapo also hinted he'll elongate the phase-out time for some clean-energy tax breaks enacted under former President Joe Biden — a huge no-no for House Freedom Caucus members, who made their quick repeal a must in exchange for their votes.
That means Trump is about to find himself in a familiar spot — playing referee between the chambers — and his team knows it. He could start blowing the whistle as soon as Thursday, when he meets with Thune and Crapo at the White House.
There's good reason to think that Trump will ultimately be able to impose his will on the unruly GOP lawmakers. There were signs he was already doing so this week, after rumblings emerged about some Senate Republicans wanting to scale back Trump's tax priorities in order to pay for the business tax provisions.
Trump's campaign pledges to exempt tips, overtime pay and Social Security from income taxes made it into the House bill at a cost of $230 billion, according to a Joint Committee on Taxation score. Scrapping or scaling back any of those provisions could have been a huge boon to Senate tax writers.
But the White House made clear behind the scenes that would be a no-go: 'We're not willing to entertain any scaling back of our signature promises,' a second Trump administration official said. 'You're not going to rock the president's commitments to the voters to pay for [business] expensing in the out years.'
On Tuesday, Thune made it clear to reporters that Trump's priorities would stay — words the White House welcomed.
So don't expect much stomach inside the GOP for bucking Trump's wishes over the coming weeks. It's telling that, as I was told, none of the Senate Finance Republicans who met with Trump last week raised the issue of shrinking his tax wish list during their White House skull session.
That just underscores how no one — not even senators who get six-year terms and have historically relished their independence — wants to tell the most powerful man in the world: Please, Mr. President, we'd like to water down your campaign promises to substitute one of our own.
'I think ultimately a lot of members are wish-casting different structures to permit more of their own priorities, and certainly that's something that senators are welcome to do,' the first official said. But 'the president's priorities are not negotiable in this process.'
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BarabakFocusing on politics out West, from the Golden Gate to the U.S. me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
