{"id":6322,"date":"2025-02-19T18:03:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T18:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/trump-stuns-senate-gop-with-house-budget-endorsement\/"},"modified":"2025-02-19T18:03:41","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T18:03:41","slug":"trump-stuns-senate-gop-with-house-budget-endorsement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/trump-stuns-senate-gop-with-house-budget-endorsement\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump stuns Senate GOP with House budget endorsement"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Republicans on Capitol Hill have long wanted President Donald Trump to weigh in on the strategic disputes that have divided the two chambers over how to pass his legislative agenda.<\/p>\n

But this is not what GOP senators had in mind.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s public call Wednesday for the adoption of a House-drafted budget framework \u2014 and the \u201cone big, beautiful bill\u201d it sketches out \u2014 left Senate Republicans flat-footed and uncertain about the path forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs they say, did not see that one coming,\u201d Senate Majority Leader John Thune said after emerging from a morning huddle with his fellow GOP leaders. Trump, he confirmed, gave him no heads up that his Truth Social missive backing the House was coming.<\/p>\n

It came less than a day after Thune moved to put the Senate\u2019s two-bill blueprint on the floor \u2014 teeing up hours of debate and a grueling succession of votes that was expected to fill the rest of the chamber\u2019s workweek.<\/p>\n

Now Trump\u2019s backing of the House plan has them rethinking their next moves. After meeting with members of his leadership team and Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham on Wednesday morning, Thune said he was \u201cplanning to proceed\u201d but added that \u201cwe are interested in and hoping to hear with more clarity where the White House is coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n

That clarity could come early Wednesday afternoon, when Vice President JD Vance visits the weekly Senate GOP policy lunch and is expected to relay the White House position on the budget. He is likely to face pointed questions from frustrated and blindsided senators who still favor the two-track plan and harbor doubts about whether the House can actually approve its own budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump needs a fallback position,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, arguing the Senate should stay the course. “I\u2019m not sure [the House budget could] pass the House or that it could pass the Senate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compounding the frustration is that Republican senators have stayed in Washington for the shortened Presidents Day week while the House, pursuant to a schedule set months ago, is in recess after GOP leaders muscled their budget plan through committee last week.<\/p>\n

Responding to Trump\u2019s demand for both chambers to pass the House plan, one Republican senator granted anonymity to speak candidly said, \u201cI\u2019d love to, but the House keeps taking weeks off instead of passing budgets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the plan Senate Republican leaders laid out Tuesday, they would adopt their budget resolution late Thursday or on Friday following a \u201cvote-a-rama\u201d on dozens of planned amendments. Now they find themselves in a holding pattern.<\/p>\n

Graham, asked about what Trump\u2019s endorsement means for his budget, told reporters: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna hear from JD at lunch, and I\u2019ll comment after that. That\u2019s all I\u2019m gonna say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso separately said that the Senate\u2019s budget resolution is \u201cstill on schedule\u201d for now but acknowledged there would be more discussions through Wednesday.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly the first time Trump has caught Senate Republicans off guard since the November election \u2013 delivering a perennial reminder that the president, at any moment, can upend the legislative agenda with no warning.<\/p>\n

After Thune won the majority leader race last year, one of Trump\u2019s first acts was to drop the political bombshell of announcing his intention to nominate firebrand then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to be attorney general. It was widely seen as an assertion of dominance over the GOP-controlled legislative branch.<\/p>\n

Gaetz later withdrew his name from consideration amid widespread skepticism from Republicans, but Trump and his allies have pushed through several other controversial nominees, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/p>\n

Trump has also pressured Senate Republicans to keep the door open for recess appointments, which would let him sidestep the Senate to put some of his picks in place. The idea has sparked resistance from some GOP members.<\/p>\n

But the question of how to enact Trump\u2019s sweeping agenda has been among the most persistent sources of tension inside the GOP. Trump has previously expressed his preference for the House\u2019s one-big-bill approach while also blessing the Senate\u2019s efforts to explore a two-bill alternative.<\/p>\n

Senate Republicans have been privately vibe-checking Trump, including at a recent dinner at Mar-a-Lago and during the Super Bowl, and they believed that they had his OK to proceed. On several occasions, publicly and privately, the president said he wanted whatever could get him results.<\/p>\n

There has also been mixed messaging coming from within the administration: Vance, White House policy chief Stephen Miller and budget chief Russ Vought are among those who have favored the Senate\u2019s preferred two-bill approach.<\/p>\n

GOP senators say their plan will more quickly deliver on Trump\u2019s key campaign plank of heightening border security, and they felt even more empowered after Vought and Trump border czar Tom Homan made the case to them for more border resources at a closed-door lunch earlier this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the near term, the president has asked for resources to secure the border. We know we have to rebuild our military, and those are priorities that are addressed in the targeted bill that we put together,\u201d Thune said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Many Senate Republicans, meanwhile, continue to believe that the House will not actually be able to move forward with its budget given Speaker Mike Johnson\u2019s tight margins and the difficult policy questions they have to resolve inside their ranks.<\/p>\n

House Republicans are planning to bring their blueprint to the floor next week but are still trying to lock down a dozen or more holdouts \u2014 a heavy lift for Johnson given his two-vote majority.<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s Truth Social post sparked immediate celebrations by some in the House GOP, he also threw them a new curveball when he said during a Fox News interview<\/u><\/a> that “Medicare, Medicaid \u2014 none of that stuff is going to be touched,” aside from efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. The House plan envisions cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid.<\/p>\n

What is clear is that Trump appears to be ready to take a more active role in getting his agenda over the finish line than he has in the past months.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy guess is, knowing him, he’s doing everything he can to goose both houses,\u201d Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said, \u201cbecause time is short.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

Republicans on Capitol Hill have long wanted President Donald Trump to weigh in on the strategic disputes that have divided the two chambers over how to pass his legislative agenda. But this is not what GOP senators had in mind. Trump\u2019s public call Wednesday for the adoption of a House-drafted budget framework \u2014 and the […]<\/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-6322","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\/6322","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=6322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}