The Urgency Of Time: Why Mike Johnson Must Do What He Has To Do

Two major issues are going to come up in the Congress of the United States this year because Republicans do not actually have a supermajority in the Senate, which means they have to use a process that is called reconciliation. 

Reconciliation can only be used on budgetary bills and matters, which means it can only be used once, or possibly twice at the most, inside of a year.

The big question for Republicans in the House and the Senate is whether they are going to create two bills and vote on them separately over the course of the year.

One is going to be a border bill that’s going to attempt to increase border security and complete the building of the border wall, to change the law where necessary in order to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants. That would be bill number one.

Bill number two would be making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.

There are basically two possible strategies here. One strategy would be to separate those two bills. In some ways that might be better, and in some ways it might be worse. 

The other strategy would be to wrap them up into one giant bill. This method would cause more compromises to be cut than might be cut if the bill was separated into two. That’s because piling everything into one bill on border matters and tax matters and having an up or down vote creates more crap in the crap sandwich.

It’s like an omnibus package that includes tax matters and border matters.

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Many conservatives are concerned about this. The House Freedom Caucus is upset because it will take additional spending on the border in order to secure the border. The Trump tax cuts may lead to short-term lowering of federal revenue into the tax coffers, so their question is how to offset that in terms of spending.

Meanwhile, Republicans would also like to increase the defense budget in the face of a vastly aggressive China.

If all of this gets wrapped in one bill and Trump says to the American body politic and to the constituents of all these Republicans, “Listen, the bill has a lot of stuff I don’t like, but it has a lot of stuff I do like. I’m ‘yes,’ on the bill. Everybody else should be ‘yes’ on the bill,” Republicans will be pressured to go ‘yes’ on the bill, even if there’s more crap included in the crap sandwich.

The alternative, which is to separate the two bills — the border bill and the tax bill — is that neither may pass. It may be an opportunity for people to signal their discontent on matters regarding Trump’s approach to the border. If you’re on the left wing of the Republican Party on tax matters, there’s going to be some pretty serious battles inside the Republican Party with regard to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction that allows taxpayers to subtract a portion of their state and local taxes from their federal taxable income.

The 2017 tax cuts asserted that if you paid taxes in California or New York, that didn’t mean you could deduct the taxes you paid on the state level against your federal taxable income. That would have been a sort of affirmative action program on taxes for blue states. That got removed.

But there are a lot of people, Republicans from New York and California, who would like to restore the SALT deductions in the tax code, and that’s going to be an open battle.

So strategically speaking, the question is, do you go for two purer and smaller bills, or do you go for one less pure, bigger, beautiful bill?

Because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is working with such a slim majority, he would prefer one bill because he wants to get everything that Trump wants. His choices are: get less of what Trump wants and less bad stuff, or get more of what Trump wants and more bad stuff.

That’s the nature of the bargain here. There is no third choice where you get all the great things that you want and none of the bad things that you don’t want. That’s not how it works with a majority this slim in the House and a pretty slim majority in the Senate as well.

This is a matter of strategy. It’s not a matter of principle. Johnson is very conservative. So too, for example, is House Ways and Means chair Jason Smith, a Republican from Missouri and a very conservative member of Congress. He’s also calling for one big bill. The idea would be get this bill rammed through by April — and do it fast. Do it quickly, because as we all know, the midterms are going to come up in a couple of years, which means Trump has two years to get everything he wants done.

And that really means he has one year to get it done. By the time he hits his second year, everybody will already be running for reelection, and they will have their eyes on their next race.

Smith pointed out that practically no parties have succeeded in passing two reconciliation bills in the same year in decades.

The bottom line is: Johnson is, in fact, a very good strategist. So is John Thune (R-SD), the Senate Majority Leader.

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When Republican congresspeople talk about how we are not solving our national debt with these bills, they are damn right: We’re not solving our national debt with these bills. There is no need in pretending that anything being proposed is going to solve the national debt. The reality is that the national debt is never going to get solved until the entitlement programs that no one is going to touch are, indeed, touched. Until you touch Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, you are not going to be able to tackle the national debt.

So what does that mean? Those tax cuts better be made permanent because otherwise Democrats are going to reverse those at the first available opportunity, thus destroying the possibility of economic growth that could help facilitate solutions to issues like the national debt.

The border bill better be passed now because Democrats sure as hell aren’t going to pass a good border bill if they are in charge or if they gain control of the House of Representatives.

So, understand what Johnson has to do.

And he will get it done.