Congress
Trump backs key Senate tax plan strategy in struggle with House
President Donald Trump indicated to GOP senators during a White House meeting Thursday that he supports using an accounting method that would treat trillions of dollars in tax cuts in a massive GOP package as costing nothing, according to three senators who attended the meeting and three other people familiar with the conversation.
“If you are going to make the tax code permanent, by definition it’s going to be with current policy,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who affirmed that Trump is on board with the accounting tactic. “The aperture is opened up a bit in thinking more broadly around how we continue to find additional reductions in federal spending.”
House and Senate Republicans are split on the controversial accounting tactic, though Speaker Mike Johnson is increasingly open to using it. The move would make it easier for GOP lawmakers to make the math work on their costly plan.
But many hard-liners are suspicious of the tactic and want to stick with Congress’s traditional accounting method, which would show that extending the tax cuts, and adding other provisions Trump wants, would cost trillions of dollars.
Settling the matter will be key as the House and Senate try to reconcile vast differences in their approaches to the massive Trump agenda bill spanning border, energy, taxes and defense spending. But it is likely to run into trouble with deficit hawks, especially in the House, who insist that tax cuts must be accompanied by spending reductions.
Trump also reiterated he wants the 2017 tax cuts he presided over to be extended permanently. And, he raised his Gold Visa card concept as a way to pay for the vast package, along with tariffs and other options.
The GOP senators in the room also discussed the politically complex issue of raising the debt ceiling, which Trump has pushed to be in the package because he doesn’t want to negotiate a separate deal with Democrats.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he made clear in the meeting he still wants incredibly steep spending cuts in order to back a debt limit increase, adding Trump was receptive to his pitch to pare back a vast swath of federal spending to pre-COVID levels.
“I don’t know that we solved anything. We got what we needed — just some kind of direction and feel for where the president wants all this to land,” Senate GOP leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters when he returned to the Capitol.
The Republicans who met with Trump on Thursday are all members of the Senate Finance Committee who are trying to work through a host of complex and arduous tax talks in order to decide what they can fit into their party-line bill.
“It’s kind of along the lines of what we’ve been talking about for some time,” Thune said.
Sen. Thom Tillis said the conversation with the president helped to act as “a funnel” for the vast list of tax policies that GOP senators are trying to squeeze into the package.
But some senators in the meeting appeared less enthusiastic that they had made any major progress.
“Talk, talk, talk, talk,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said. “Just like the last 10 weeks.”
House and Senate Republicans are stuck in an increasingly bitter impasse over how to advance Trump’s vast legislative agenda and how quickly to move.
Many House Republicans were livid earlier this week when Tillis emerged from a meeting of Senate Finance Republicans on Monday evening and suggested August was the real timeline for passing a budget reconciliation bill, citing the tax talks.
Heading to the White House meeting on Thursday, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo again declined to predict any timeline for the Congress to advance or pass the package and its many tax provisions.
Other members of his panel hoped the meeting with Trump and his advisers would help start to bridge the divide between the two chambers — something Trump has struggled to do.
“I’m not even going to joke about it,” the normally soft-spoken Crapo said, with a smile.
Thune has been organizing meetings all week with small groups of his conference as he and GOP leaders try to hear from a cross-section of GOP senators about what they want to see in a reconciliation bill, which would allow Republicans to short-circuit a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
Those meetings, according to senators in attendance, have focused on the tax provisions — including measuring support for using the current policy baseline accounting method to make the extension of the Trump-era tax cuts appear to cost nothing.
Senate Republicans are also using the meetings to discuss how big they should go on spending cuts and outline the challenges of the major task ahead.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered some sidelong criticism of her colleagues in the other chamber Friday after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would vote to allow passage of a GOP spending patch.
“America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People,” she said in a statement, endorsing an alternative bill from top Democratic appropriators Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
Pelosi also said she backed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ decision to oppose the bill. All House Democrats but one voted against it.
President Donald Trump on Friday congratulated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for “doing the right thing” by backing the Republican-led bill to avert a government shutdown, a choice that’s put the New York Democrat at odds with many in his party.
“A non pass would be a Country destroyer, approval will lead us to new heights,” wrote the president Friday morning on Truth Social. “Again, really good and smart move by Senator Schumer,” wrote the president on Truth Social.
“Took ‘guts’ and courage!” Trump added.
Schumer is facing an onslaught of criticism from his left flank, with some progressive activists now referring to the lawmaker’s decision to vote for the House GOP-passed, seven-month funding measure as the “Schumer surrender.”
Trump, in that social media post, also said he wants to address demand for California wildfire aid in a separate Republican bill encompassing his top policy priorities.
More than 100 House Democrats on Friday sent a letter to top Trump officials, decrying the arrest of a former Columbia graduate student as an attack on the First Amendment and questioning the murky legal authority invoked by the administration.
The lawmakers, including authors Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, addressed the letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The letter, first obtained by Blue Light News, slams the use of a Cold War-era section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deport Mahmoud Khalil as the “playbook of authoritarians.” The law was aimed at protecting national interests against potential foreign intervention.
The letter also calls on the administration to answer questions about its actions, including what “evidentiary grounds” Rubio has relied upon to conclude that Khalil’s presence in the United States threatens “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” — and what those foreign policy consequences might be.
The letter asks the administration to respond by March 27 with answers, as well as documents, including legal memoranda, that explain the administration’s findings.
“The deployment of a dusty old statutory section to punish speech is a dangerous attack on both the First Amendment and on all, including lawful permanent residents, who enjoy its protection,” the letter states. “This maneuver evokes the Alien and Sedition Acts and McCarthyism. It is the playbook of authoritarians, not of elected officials in a democratic society who claim to be the champions of free speech.”
Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who played a central role in campus protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas war, was arrested over the weekend — marking a significant shift in the U.S. government’s use of its immigration enforcement powers. Khalil is a permanent resident with a green card, but was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as President Donald Trump promised more such arrests are coming.
The administration has argued that the protests are antisemitic, and some Jewish students have reported feeling threatened by the demonstrations on college campuses against Israel’s attacks on Gaza. The administration has accused Khalil of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” but has not provided specific evidence — nor has he been charged or convicted of any crimes.
The administration is relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — a rarely invoked authority that allows Rubio to expel foreigners. The provision, which is set to be tested in the courts, says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Khalil’s detainment sparked outrage from activists, free speech groups and several Democrats. A judge has halted his deportation, but his fate remains uncertain as the arrest raises a number of legal questions, including significant constitutional ones.
“Weaponizing the immigration system to crush and chill protected free speech puts our nation on the side of authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping,” the Democrats wrote. “We urge you to turn back before you suffer another stinging loss in court and visit terrible damage on the country.”
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