Senate GOP Leaders Pull a Bait-and-Switch With Reconciliation 3.0

Conservatives have every right to feel betrayed by the Republican Congress’ recent antics.

Freemarketeers, from the U.S. House to homes across America, were told in April to accept Senate Republican Leader John Thune’s emaciated Reconciliation 2.0 bill. The South Dakotan employed a limited-use budget procedure that obviates that pesky 60-vote filibuster threshold and permits passage via simple majority.

These special bills typically deliver the sponsoring party’s leading initiatives. This is how President Donald J. Trump and Republicans enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill in 2025 and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. Reconciliation was the needle through which Obama and Democrats injected the poison of Obamacare into America’s body politic in 2010.

The dangerously cautious Thune had no such ambitions. Rather than a freight train, Reconciliation 2.0 was a rusty caboose. It funded little more than ICE and Border Patrol salaries.

Conservatives, eager for a bill packed with Trump/MAGA reforms, were suspicious. “I don’t think Border Patrol and ICE should be isolated,” warned Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas), the House Freedom Caucus’s policy chairman. “House Republicans are concerned about giving up their best tool to pressure the Senate to pass legislation dealing with affordability ahead of the November elections,” the Washington Examiner reported. 

The April 28 Washington Post was more sanguine: “Republican leadership told members during a GOP conference meeting last night that they would have their chance to pass their other priorities in a third reconciliation bill later this year.” Comforted by these and other reassurances, House Republicans adopted Reconciliation 2.0 on April 29, by a 215-211 party-line vote.

Now, just three weeks later, Reconciliation 3.0 looks like a classic bait and switch. 

The iridescent Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) said, “I’m labor, not management.” Nonetheless, he is painfully aware of the Senate management’s demoralizing blend of sloth and slyness. He told congressional correspondents: “Those who tell us that we’re going to have a third reconciliation bill have been smoking the Devil’s lettuce.”

“That is hard to do, quite frankly,” Senate Ethics Committee Chairman James Lankford (R-Okla.) told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. “It is not impossible to do a Reconciliation 3.0 in November and December. That is more likely.”

Are you kidding me?

In November or December — after the mid-term elections?

Earth to Senator Lankford: Congress enacts legislation to satisfy Americans before they vote, not after. That’s how elections work. 

Despite the principle and courage of some Republican senators, the upper chamber seems collectively hell-bent on surrendering control to Democrats—never mind recent GOP wins in the redistricting wars.

Rather than work tirelessly on Reconciliation 3.0—including the SAVE America Act, an illegal-alien-free 2030 Census, tax cuts, DOGE-driven budget reductions, a War on Fraud, and statutes to codify President Trump’s executive orders—Republican senators grumble that they lack time for such action, even as they savor yet another vacation.

Senators last gathered on Thursday, May 21, and do not return to Capitol Hill until Monday, June 1, at 3:00 p.m. This leaves plenty of time for leisurely lunches before the one vote that Thune has scheduled that day—cloture on two judicial nominations. How exhausting. (For its part, the House departed when the Senate did and does not reconvene until Tuesday, June 2. Tsk tsk.) 

If GOP senators are too weak and listless to pull their weight, they cannot expect mega-MAGA volunteers to knock doors, man phone banks, attend rallies, and fight, fight, fight to win elections.

The Republican Senate apparently wishes to abandon Reconciliation 3.0, ditch the most promising vehicle for securing pre-mid-term policy victories, alienate the conservative base, embitter those who believed in this Congress, surrender the House gavel to Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, and perhaps reinstate Democrat Chuck Schumer as Senate leader.

Even a one-seat Democrat majority will disembowel the America First agenda, devolve Trump into an instant lame duck, and devote the next two years to serving as the U.S. House of Impeachment.

“Americans vote for leaders who do not miss an opportunity to make life easier and more affordable for  everyday families and individuals,” Richard Stern of Advancing American Freedom told me. “If the promised Reconciliation 3.0 doesn’t happen, as rumors now suggest, it will be yet another broken pledge from a conservative congressional majority that seems never to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

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