CNN
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House Speaker Mike Johnson told Republicans during a closed-door meeting Saturday that he supports President Donald Trump moving his agenda as part of an overarching package, according to sources present. This is an important announcement that carries risks, but it is a stepping stone to advance the next president’s ambitious policies. schedule.
The effort to combine border, energy and tax policy into a single bill is a shift from previous policy by Senate Republican leader John Thune, but the effort is a departure from previous policy from Senate Republican Leader John Thune, but the move is a departure from how Trump’s team views the legislative landscape in recent weeks. It also represents the evolution of the beginning. A person familiar with the changes told CNN that the debacle in the spending bill and the close election for speaker meant there was little room to reconcile two separate bills, one on border and energy and one on tax policy. He said it happened.
Thune and other Republican senators say it would be more protracted to revitalize President Trump’s term with a border and energy bill packed with widely popular Republican ideas and force a tax bill through the end of the year. He argued that it was politically better than taking risks. End the tax battle.
But several leading Republicans in the House, including Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, argued that the two bills would be too unmanageable in the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority. The government had spent months pushing for a single bill.
“It shows that the best and fastest approach to offer President Trump is a beautiful, big package,” Smith told CNN last month.
Huge bills will take much longer to negotiate and pose a greater challenge for political parties with little margin for error. A bill of this size would need to pass through multiple jurisdictional committees and would likely take much longer than more restrictive border or energy bills. When Thune laid out his vision after finalizing his role as Senate Majority Leader in November, he said he had ambitions to pass narrow legislation that addressed the border and energy but not tax policy. We set up a 100-day sprint.
While senators argued that tax reform and tightening border and energy policies would take time, a strategy of combining two separate bills would lead to an early victory for Trump, but many in the House believe that Trump’s They were concerned that momentum for the rest of the agenda would be wasted. Some House Republicans are worried Congress won’t be able to “give it another bite,” according to people familiar with the discussions, and tax policy, which was one of Mr. Trump’s key campaign platforms, is worried that Congress won’t be able to “take another bite” of tax policy, according to people familiar with the discussions. I don’t want to ignore it.
Friday’s single-bill pledge reelected Johnson as speaker and led the Louisiana Republican Party as Republicans look to lay out a clear strategy for Trump’s policy agenda just weeks before his inauguration. This brought an early victory to Mr. Trump, who had supported and demanded the following. in his place. The meeting also helped avoid a protracted battle that the president-elect had warned could undermine confidence in the Republican takeover of Washington.
Republican Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia told CNN on Friday that a promise by Johnson and the Trump team to push for a single bill helped him vote yes.
And Texas Republican Rep. Keith Self, who reversed his vote at the last minute to support Mr. Johnson, also told CNN on Friday that he looked forward to introducing a “big, beautiful” bill now that the race for speaker is over. He said he is doing so.
“The message was clear,” Self said of the conversation with Trump that prompted him to switch his vote.
“The message was that he wanted what everyone else wanted, which was to get his agenda passed,” Self said. “And that was my message to him: ‘Mr. President, we need a strong negotiating team.’
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.
