{"id":7607,"date":"2025-03-24T12:07:38","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T12:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/capitol-agenda-quiet-standoff-over-trumps-agenda\/"},"modified":"2025-03-24T12:07:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T12:07:38","slug":"capitol-agenda-quiet-standoff-over-trumps-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/capitol-agenda-quiet-standoff-over-trumps-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitol agenda: Quiet standoff over Trump\u2019s agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Congress is back. Lawmakers have three weeks to make major progress on their behemoth party-line bill.<\/p>\n

Hill Republicans are focused now on advancing President Donald Trump\u2019s border, energy and tax priorities. Speaker Mike Johnson has set an aggressive goal of finalizing a budget blueprint with the Senate and getting it passed in the House by the week of April 7 \u2014 softening his earlier ambitions to pass the final bill by Easter. The budget is necessary for enacting Trump’s domestic agenda along party lines through a process known as reconciliation.<\/p>\n

Efforts to resolve differences between the House and Senate GOP budget resolutions are going nowhere fast<\/u><\/a>. Instead, House and Senate Republicans are mired in a blame game over who is slowing down the process.<\/p>\n

There are several major hurdles for the House side: Republicans still need to determine how much they can slash from social safety-net programs. They also need to figure out how to extend existing tax cuts while providing new tax breaks Trump has promised, all without blowing a hole in the deficit \u2014 plus agree to a fix for the state and local tax deduction.<\/p>\n

“How can we be moving quickly when some of those foundational questions haven’t been settled?\u201d North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis asked.<\/p>\n

Senate GOP leaders have been careful to not provide any specific timeline on Trump\u2019s agenda \u2014 though a person granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the goal is to adopt a modified budget resolution in the next three weeks. House Republicans are waiting on the Senate to agree on a fiscal outline before they draft any reconciliation bill, leaving the two chambers at a standstill.<\/p>\n

Senate Republicans have been reluctant to hold another marathon vote series on a conforming budget resolution unless they are sure their House colleagues can actually pass a reconciliation bill with the $2 trillion in cuts Johnson promised to his hard-liners, according to three Republicans who were granted anonymity to detail their internal discussions.<\/p>\n

\u201cProbably what we are going to do is talk each other to death, stare at each other and then eventually, you know, confuse the issue so much that it takes two months to unravel what we agree to,\u201d GOP Sen. Rand Paul said.<\/p>\n

What else we\u2019re watching:<\/b><\/p>\n