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\n

President Donald Trump is calling for Republicans to pass a $350 billion bill to fund the military while notching conservative policy victories \u2014 and GOP senators aren\u2019t exactly scurrying to action.<\/p>\n

House Republican leaders and committee chairs have been meeting for weeks about what to include in a new party-line reconciliation package. Speaker Mike Johnson has also had conversations about the House\u2019s vision with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. <\/p>\n

But the Senate has taken no concrete steps toward advancing a bill, and GOP senators and aides said this week it was becoming clear any \u201cReconciliation 3.0\u201d would be a House-led effort. Multiple Senate Republicans \u2014 including members of leadership \u2014 say they don\u2019t currently see a path that could marshall 50 votes behind such a measure on their side of the Capitol just months before the midterms.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody has a different concept of what they want, which is going to be the problem,\u201d Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview this week.<\/p>\n

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said a third bill \u201cdoesn\u2019t look to me like it’s got a lot of life in it,\u201d while Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) separately warned that if his party was going to pass a third reconciliation bill, Republicans need to \u201csaddle up and ride hard, because we\u2019re running out of time.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be a senior at Cal Tech to know that the closer you get to the midterms, the harder it is to get anything done around here,\u201d Kennedy added. <\/p>\n

Republicans in the Senate aren\u2019t entirely ruling out coalescing behind a plan, knowing they would risk sparking Trump\u2019s wrath if they do. But they\u2019re airing plenty of doubts, and that pessimism \u2014 combined with a lack of clear movement toward assembling policy priorities and satisfactory pay-fors \u2014 doesn\u2019t bode well for the GOP\u2019s ability to deliver on the president\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n

A handful of Senate Republicans have been going through some of the motions. Cornyn, Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming and Budget Chair Lindsey Graham of South Carolina met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week to discuss using reconciliation to bolster the Pentagon\u2019s budget amid the ongoing conflict with Iran.<\/p>\n

Graham, after his meeting with Hegseth, said in an X post that he will be working with Senate leaders, Budget Committee Republicans and the administration \u201cto see if we can get this process moving as expeditiously as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cIn my view, time is of the essence.\u201d <\/p>\n

But three Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee said there was no movement toward drafting a budget resolution \u2014 a prerequisite for unlocking the filibuster-skirting power of another reconciliation bill \u2014 nor have they received details on a timeline from Graham.<\/p>\n

In an interview Monday, Graham said only, \u201cI love reconciliation; I want it to never end.\u201d<\/p>\n

The party-line bill currently under discussion would be the third one passed in this Congress, following on last year\u2019s $4.5 trillion tax-cuts-focused megabill and the $70 billion immigration enforcement funding package finalized earlier this month \u2014 hence \u201cReconciliation 3.0.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barrasso said Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has had conversations on potential ways to help pay for a third reconciliation package through changes to the tax code, but that claim appeared to come as a surprise to Crapo.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to do a Reconciliation Three, but we are not crafting one or anything like that,\u201d Crapo said in an interview earlier this week. \u201cI mean, we are always discussing tax policy.\u201d <\/p>\n

Their posture is being influenced by the math within their own conference: With a 53-seat majority, Thune can only afford to lose three GOP senators with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote. <\/p>\n

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky \u2014 another senior GOP appropriator who is currently hospitalized \u2014 both predicted during a recent hearing that a third reconciliation bill would not happen. Collins separately told reporters \u201cit would be very difficult to get a third reconciliation bill approved.\u201d <\/p>\n

But with the annual bipartisan appropriations process collapsing in the Senate, some Republicans see reconciliation as the only path forward to fund certain programs \u2014 as the GOP did with \u201cReconciliation 2.0\u201d that funded Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the duration of Trump\u2019s term. <\/p>\n

Cornyn said appropriators were skeptical of a third reconciliation bill because \u201cit basically carves them out of the process.\u201d But he added, \u201cI don’t think there’s any other way to deal with things like defense spending.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Senate GOP fiscal hawks could also blow up the process by demanding pay-fors for Trump\u2019s military funding request in the form of cuts to health care services. It\u2019s a reality Thune acknowledged as he recently explained the challenges of advancing another reconciliation bill, noting that while most Republicans would unite around defense spending, \u201cit certainly wouldn’t be limited to just that.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou’d have to have it offset and paid for,\u201d Thune continued, \u201cwhich implicates other committees of jurisdiction and creates unique challenges in terms of the vote count here in the Senate.\u201d <\/p>\n

Republican leaders are especially fearful of any scenario where vulnerable incumbents will have to take difficult votes related to health care so close to the elections. This conversation is also playing out in the House, where Republican leaders have signaled an interest in pursuing another reconciliation bill with hundreds of billions of dollars in new defense spending that would likely be offset by crackdowns on alleged fraud in social services programs.<\/p>\n

Moderates are balking at many of the proposals on the table \u2014 frustrating House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who said last week he could save hundreds of billions of dollars by cracking down on \u201cfraud\u201d across multiple social safety net programs if only his colleagues would join him. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have more than enough resources in savings \u2026 That I can tell you,\u201d Arrington said in an interview. <\/p>\n

One House Republican who was granted anonymity to speak freely said nobody is taking the current slate of offset recommendations seriously: \u201cIt\u2019s fake pay-fors for defense spending no one has fully agreed to and no meaningful reforms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, House GOP leaders are expected to forge ahead with plans to unveil more of their framework after the chamber returns from recess next week. Some members want to adopt a budget blueprint and also pass the bill out of the House before the August break \u2014 a timeline many Republicans consider highly ambitious and can\u2019t happen unless Senate Republicans are on board. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, Barrasso is tempering expectations. He told reporters this week that while conversations are ongoing around Reconciliation 3.0, \u201cthe important thing is that we got Reconciliation 2.0 done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thune also isn\u2019t making any promises.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I said before on another reconciliation bill, you’ve got to have something that gets 50 and 218,\u201d he told reporters, \u201cand I’m not sure exactly at this point what that is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meredith Lee Hill, Jennifer Scholtes and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report. <\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump is calling for Republicans to pass a $350 billion bill to fund the military while notching conservative policy victories \u2014 and GOP senators aren\u2019t exactly scurrying to action. House Republican leaders and committee chairs have been meeting for weeks about what to include in a new party-line reconciliation package. Speaker Mike Johnson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}