President-elect Donald Trump is being forced to relive the congressional infighting of 2017 as a narrow House majority threatens to derail the start of his second term.
Trump won’t be sworn in until Monday, but he is already playing referee to an intraparty dispute over how to renew his signature tax cuts alongside priorities like defense and border security.
Republicans fear repeating the mistakes of their failed attempts at Obamacare repeal, well aware that divisions could deny Trump a major win in his first 100 days. But simple House math has made passing his priorities even more complicated than they were in 2017.
Republicans held a 23-seat House majority and still struggled to clear their tax bill by the end of Trump’s first year in office. This time, they will be able to spare two votes once all members are seated.
Senate Republicans, wanting to avoid a protracted standoff, plan to punt the tax debate until later in the year, viewing a quick legislative victory on energy and the border as the best path to enacting Trump’s agenda.
A year-end cliff to renew expiring portions of the tax cuts would then serve as incentive to negotiate them in a separate bill.
But tax writers in the House refuse to break Trump’s agenda up, seeing the border and energy provisions as deal-sweeteners needed to get tax reform done.
Trump is aware his legacy is on the line if Republicans can’t resolve their differences and has spent the transition period charming the factions at odds with one another. He hosted groups of House Republicans at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida last week after meeting with Senate Republicans at the Capitol.
But Trump is reluctant to get in the weeds on legislative policy and has, to some extent, left congressional Republicans drifting by refusing to give them firm marching orders.
He prefers “one big, beautiful bill” but has granted congressional leaders the flexibility to break the legislation into parts if it can pass more easily that way.
The House-versus-Senate standoff should feel familiar to Trump. The repeal of Obamacare floundered, in part, because the Senate decided to start from scratch after the House passed its version of the bill.
This term, the two chambers have simply decided to “race” one another rather than get on the same page on timing.
Meanwhile, Trump is dealing with many of the same holdups on tax reform that delayed its passage in 2017.
He is siding with blue-state Republicans who want to expand the cap on SALT, a tax deduction for high-income earners that Congress severely limited in 2017. Their support is critical to reauthorizing the broader tax bill, with a dozen Republicans from New York, New Jersey, and California voting against the original tax law due to its SALT provisions.
Congress will also consider whether to renew expanded child tax credits that expire at the end of 2025.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a liaison to the House for Senate GOP leadership, downplayed the idea that Republican divisions might derail Trump’s agenda.
“I don’t think so,” Mullin said, predicting all sides would eventually come together on a legislative strategy. “We’re going to have to, but I think President Trump will play a big role in that, bringing us together.”
Even so, he and other Republicans are sober about the task before them. Republicans are not simply reauthorizing the tax bill but also considering changes including a raft of promises Trump made on the campaign trail.
Among other proposals, he wants Congress to exempt the tip wages of service workers as part of the reauthorization.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a member of the House until 2019, recalled how tenuous negotiations were for the 2017 tax bill, telling the Washington Examiner he was a “no” vote until the night before it passed the House.
He finally agreed to support the legislation following a meeting in Speaker Paul Ryan’s office over some agriculture language he wanted “cleaned up.”
This time, he thinks Republicans are better off keeping things simple. The more Congress deviates from its 2017 baseline, the greater the odds of failure, he said.
“If we don’t ‘keep it simple, stupid,’ we could set off another whole chain of events,” he said.
Trump has a more pliable Congress as he enters a second term, with his backing of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) credited with tamping down repeated rebellions this past year. Still, the limits of Trump’s influence are already being tested within the House.
In December, members of the Freedom Caucus rebuffed his demand to extend the debt ceiling in a fight over government funding and are asking for trillions in spending cuts if he wants their votes ahead of a June fiscal cliff.
Fiscal hawks also expect cuts if Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) decides to move forward with a border and defense bill.
“I can be persuaded to vote for it. But if it’s just a spending bill that makes the debt worse, I may not be,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
Republicans have a slightly more comfortable majority in the Senate compared to the first time they had unified control under Trump: 53 seats versus 52 in 2017.
But the demands of Paul and his Freedom Caucus allies will still prove decisive for the incoming president.
They did not pose a major obstacle in the 2017 tax fight, with the Freedom Caucus approving a framework Ryan released weeks before a House vote. But on Obamacare, they blocked an early version of the bill from being brought to the floor.
The Freedom Caucus eventually negotiated revisions to the legislation that secured its passage, but not without Trump threatening to saddle them with blame if the 2009 law stayed intact.
Its death in the Senate was largely attributed to Sen. John McCain, the centrist Republican who cast a shock vote against “skinny” repeal. But three other Republicans, two of them centrists, were also standing in the way of repeated attempts to roll back the law.
The lessons of that Obamacare fight are not lost on senators as they brace for House gridlock.
“Know how many votes you have before you bring it to the floor is one of them,” Cramer quipped.
Republicans would not put Obamacare repeal up for a vote again after it failed in such dramatic fashion.
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For his second term, Trump believes that Democratic support would be needed for him to attempt another healthcare overhaul, relitigating in a December interview how McCain and the other GOP holdouts “let us down.”
“But until we have that or until they can approve it, but we’re not going to go through the big deal,” Trump told NBC News.