Earlier this month, a senior White House official deeply involved in
enacting President Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill laid out the
Administration’s ideal legislative schedule for the rest of this year.
“Between now and the August recess, we’d like them to get health care
done, we’d like them to get the debt ceiling done, we’d like them to
start tackling the budget,” he told me. “So when they get back from the
August recess, first or second week of September, we can throw a tax
proposal down and, literally, we can do taxes for September, October,
and November.”
The G.O.P. has adopted a major—even radical—agenda: transforming a
massive sector of the economy, slashing taxes and rewriting the entire
tax code, passing a budget that would dramatically reduce the size of
government, and, in the middle of all of that, raising the debt limit.
They have a plan to accomplish almost all of it before the end of the
year, with minimal transparency, and without relying on a single
Democratic vote. But if health-care reform goes down this summer, the
rest of the plan may sink with it.
For obscure parliamentary reasons, Republicans can’t move on with the
rest of their wish list until they pass the health-care bill. And those
prospects are not looking good. On Tuesday, Mike Lee, of Utah, became
the fifth Republican senator to say that he would vote against even
bringing the health-care bill up for debate. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, who announced, also on Tuesday, that he will delay the
vote until after the July 4th recess, may yet broker a deal on health
care, but if he fails to do so the legislative impact for Trump could be
calamitous.
The parliamentary maneuver McConnell is using is called reconciliation.
The process was created, in 1974, as a way to streamline the
congressional budgeting process. It wasn’t intended to be used for major
legislative changes. However, as partisan deadlock has grown, it has
become an increasingly attractive legislative tool because it is
protected from a filibuster in the Senate and therefore needs only
fifty, rather than sixty, votes to pass. (Vice-President Mike Pence can
cast a tie-breaking vote in both cases.)
Bill Clinton’s attempt at reforming health care was probably doomed the
day that he decided not to use reconciliation. Obama passed his initial
health-care bill through the Senate without using reconciliation, but he
always kept it as a backup plan—and it turned out that he needed it.
When he lost his sixty-vote majority in the Senate, Democrats used the
process to pass a final package of tweaks to the bill.
This year, Republicans have been even more creative. They planned to use
one reconciliation bill for health care and a separate one for the beast
of tax reform. But one of the many arcane rules about the reconciliation
process is that any new reconciliation bill cancels out the old one.
“This is the first time anyone has tried to do this,” Stan
Collender, a longtime budget expert who now works for the
strategic-communications firm MSLGROUP, said. “You can only have one budget
resolution in effect at a time. Their idea was to do health care and
then move on to tax reform, but that strategy was based on doing health
care quickly.”
If the Senate health-care bill dies and Republicans move on to tax
reform, they will have an interesting choice to make: do they give up on
health care and propose only a tax-reform bill? Or do they combine tax
reform and health care into one monster bill, which would make passage
even more daunting?
Some of these procedural issues might be overcome by a kind of nuclear
option, whereby Republicans ignore or find a way to overrule the Senate
parliamentarian who enforces the budget rules. But, however health care
is resolved, the rest of the items on the Trump agenda consist of a
series of fiendishly difficult political issues that divide Republicans.
The budget, which must be resolved by October 1st, will pit
congressional Republicans, who have decried the White House’s proposed
budget, against Trump, who was so miffed about being ignored during the
budget negotiations earlier this year that he tweeted, “Our country
needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” Republicans in the
House are comfortable with defaulting on the debt, and the President
himself has called for a shutdown. Things could quickly grow ugly.
In the middle of this drama, the White House wants to pass a
comprehensive tax-reform bill. The last time Congress approved such a
piece of legislation was in 1986, and it was the result of a lengthy and
bipartisan process of hearings and horse-trading. So how are Republicans
approaching tax reform this year? They are writing a bill in secret that
they intend to pass using reconciliation. The group writing it, which
calls itself the Big Six, consists of Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury
Secretary; Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser; Representative Kevin
Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Orrin Hatch,
the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; House Speaker Paul Ryan;
and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. There are no Democrats and
no women involved, and there have been no hearings.
“We are all on the same page,” the senior White House official told me,
referring to tax reform. “There's going to be one tax bill and one taxbill only.”
Before a tax bill can move forward, Republicans will have to agree on
health care—or abandon the issue. The health-care reconciliation package
is a giant iceberg that needs to be cleared out of the way before
Republicans can move forward with the rest of their agenda.