Trump, GOP senators wrestle over strategy for president-elect's agenda

President-elect Trump and Republican senators wrestled over the best strategy for moving Trump’s top agenda items, including border security and tax relief, during a two-hour meeting at the Capitol Wednesday night, but Trump largely resisted senators’ pleas to break his agenda up into two big bills.

Many Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), laid out the case for moving first on a package including border security, energy provisions and defense.

They argued it would be better to pass these priorities as quickly as possible before getting bogged down on the complex task of extending the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts.

But Trump firmly expressed his preference for Congress to pass the main pieces of his agenda in one bill, siding with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who thinks that approach will give him more leverage over rogue members of his conference.

One Republican senator in the room said Trump “repeatedly” expressed his preference for moving one bill.

That led to a “long back-and-forth” debate with Graham who argued for the merits of passing two bills, one focused on border security, energy and defense and a second focused on tax relief.

The more Graham made his case, the more Trump dug into his preference for moving one bill instead, according to senators in the room.

“Graham got into a long back-and-forth and the longer Graham talked, the more resolute Trump got,” said a person familiar with the conversation. “He said doing two is a bad idea, it will decrease our leverage. Let’s do one.”

“He was repeatedly pressed on it and he repeatedly pushed back and said, ‘I want one,’” the source added.

Thune eventually beseeched Trump to remain open to the idea of moving two bills under the budget reconciliation — a maneuver that bypasses the Senate filibuster and would allow Republicans to pass the bills without Democratic votes — and the president-elect said he would keep an open mind but still expressed his preference for one bill.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) also made impassioned arguments for moving two budget reconciliation bills this year.

Cruz warned that Republicans risked disaster if they put all their eggs into one basket.

He said there’s a “very real risk” of one big bill “not getting the votes to pass.”

“I think there’s a much greater risk of failure doing that,” he said of the one-bill approach. “We can’t fail. The stakes are too high to fail.”

“There was widespread agreement if not total unanimity in that room on that point,” Cruz said. “I think we had a very positive and substantive conversation and I think he absolutely heard what we had to say.”

Hoeven said he proposed the idea of letting the Senate get started on a bill focused on border security, energy and defense so that the House would have an opportunity to “grab it” if tax legislation bogged down amid disagreements in the lower chamber.

“He’s clear, he wants one big, beautiful bill,” Hoeven said. “I said let’s set it up as a horse race and see what advances better and faster.”

“When I suggested a horse race, he said, ‘We’ll see,’” he added. “Lindsey started that whole line [of discussion,] and then Thune kind of clarified some more, and then Ted Cruz came back to it. We talked about it quite a bit.”

Senate Republicans say they are worried that Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) plan to pile Trump’s biggest agenda items — border security, energy legislation, tax cuts and deficit reduction — into one bill would risk the possibility that the massive undertaking collapses under its own weight.

A second senator who requested anonymity warned that plan might backfire because “everybody is naturally suspicious of one big, giant bill on any account.”

“That same skepticism would play into this and I think Trump is going to get restless to get something done quicker to show a positive result, which we could with the smaller bill, especially with the border issue,” the senator predicted.

House GOP strategists believe that pairing a tax package with border security provisions has a better chance of passing the lower chamber because it will put more pressure on rebellious rank-and-file Republicans to support it if they have misgivings about some of the tax provisions — or the absence of certain tax provisions, such as raising the cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions.

But Senate Republicans aren’t buying that argument.

“It’s preposterous,” said a Senate GOP aide who argued that a tax relief package will have plenty of momentum later in the year without having to ride along with border security and energy reforms.

“Tax has its own momentum which is a $4.5 trillion tax hike if you do nothing. Later in the year, are you going to be the Republican that supports a $4.5 trillion tax hike?” the aide said.

“Where Trump’s energy and support comes from is on border and getting an early win for Trump on something he’s got a mandate on is critical,” the source added.  

Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso (Wyo.) on Wednesday afternoon reiterated the Senate Republican leadership’s preference for passing two budget reconciliation bills — one devoted to border security, energy reforms and defense spending and a second focused on tax relief and fiscal reform.

“We all want to get to the same outcome. I think there’s a lot of value in the two[-bill] approach because you can much more quickly do the border, to the energy, do the American security component,” he told reporters.

Barrasso, a vfeteran of the arduous Senate debate over Trump’s first major tax package, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, warned that delving into the tax code is “a process and it can take longer than it would to do the border, energy and national security.”

Graham warned earlier this week: “Delaying border security is a dangerous idea.”

Thune unveiled the Senate’s preferred strategy of moving Trump’s agenda in two separate reconciliation bills at a Senate Republican retreat in early December.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) earlier Wednesday said, “I prefer the Thune way.”

“The immediate crisis is the border,” he said, pointing out that the surge of roughly 10 million migrants across the border during President Biden’s term was a top issue in the presidential campaign.

“That is the most obvious point. The border is a crisis. At the moment, tax policy is not because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doesn’t expire in the end of the year,” he said. “That is the most obvious rationale for the Thune plan.”

Cramer also argued that legislation to expand domestic energy production by opening new land to oil and gas drilling could be done “quickly.”

Trump and Republican senators also discussed Trump’s plans to use hefty tariff increases to pay for much of his agenda. Republican senators said there wasn’t any serious pushback in the room against Trump’s love of tariffs even though some senators worry it’s bad economic policy.

“The main pay-for I heard in there was talk about big, beautiful tariffs on everything, which I think is interesting because you know some of the people who haven’t been advocates for tariffs in the past are now all saying, ‘Well, Europe has the value-added tax and we should do the same thing,’” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“If you go back a few years, we were all the people who thought a value-added tax was a terrible idea and one of the reasons why we outcompete Europe is because they have this terrible value-added tax,” he said.

“I still don’t think tariffs are a good idea,” he said. “International trade has made the entire world incredibly prosperous.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said senators and Trump also talked about the president-elect’s recent musings about Canada becoming the 51st state.

“Yeah, it was good,” Mullin quipped. “We did talk about it but it was funny.”