House GOP Reconciliation in the Cards? Johnson Sees Daylight

When there aren’t enough Senate votes to pass a bill the overwhelming majority of Americans want and the president demands, what’s a Republican congressional leader to do? The obvious answer is to get rid of the Senate filibuster. GOP senators don’t have the stomach for that, even though the Democrats have made it clear they will do it the first chance they get. Plan B is stuffing that legislation – or at least parts of it – into a broader fiscal bill and passing it through reconciliation, thereby skirting a filibuster. This is what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is going for, according to what transpired in a closed-door House Republican Conference meeting on July 14.

As reported by Politico, Johnson indicated he will have the Budget Committee mark up a budget resolution by Thursday, July 16. This will be a scaled-down version of another massive spending bill dubbed Reconciliation 3.0. According to anonymous sources, the bill will provide $20 billion for farm and agriculture funding and $67 billion for the Pentagon – but it will also include components of the SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo IDs when casting ballots.

Johnson Herds the Republican Cats

Certain Senate Republicans – including Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) – seemed quite determined to ensure the SAVE Act was going nowhere, insisting they didn’t have the votes to pass it. The vast majority of Republican voters, along with more than two-thirds of Democrat voters and most independents, indicated in surveys that they want the act passed. Thune claims he supports the bill, but he is the senator to whom everyone turned when the Senate didn’t get it done.

Details on Johnson’s reconciliation plan are light, though, and that is causing concern among the House GOP rank and file. There was some good news for the Speaker, however. On July 14, conservatives who had brought House business to a standstill in protest at the Senate’s failure to move the SAVE Act forward relented.

It appears Johnson may have won them over by suggesting other components of the contentious legislation would go into an appropriations bill to fund the State Department.

The House now faces a legislative logjam as Republicans scramble to pass several major bills before the pre-midterm elections Sept. 30 deadline.

Reconciliation to Save the SAVE Act

How can election integrity measures in a budget bill survive being stripped out by the parliamentarian, so the reconciliation process can be used? The proposal, it seems, is to tie SAVE Act measures to grants or other funding mechanisms. For states to qualify for the federal dollars, they would have to put the election security measures in place. For red states, then, this would be easy money. Democrat-controlled states would face a quandary: enact the measures they have vociferously opposed or miss out on the extra cash.

If Johnson manages to come up with the votes to get this new spending bill through the House, Sen. Thune and his Republicans in the upper chamber will be put to the test. Reconciliation means a simple majority vote, but will the Senate disfigure the bill before it is put to the floor? As Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) – one of the holdouts who shut the House down over the SAVE Act – put it in a July 14 social media post, “If John Thune strips it out in the Senate, that will be on him and the entire country should be watching what he does.”