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As the year closes, Republicans are looking to the past for another dance with a partisan exercise that tested the party’s unity and delivered President Donald Trump his crowning legislative achievement of the year.
Budget reconciliation is how congressional Republicans rammed through Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” earlier this year. But it’s a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that laid bare intra-party divisions and nearly exploded before liftoff.
Still, some Republicans want to take another stab at reconciliation, which allows a party in power to advance legislation with just a simple majority in the Senate as long as it adheres to strict, budgetary parameters.
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“We can do two more reconciliation bills without a single Democratic vote,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Fox News Digital. “Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t welcome Democratic votes, but we can do them without a single Democratic vote.”
Turning once again to reconciliation would help Senate Republicans, in particular, address one of Trump’s desires to kill the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the upper chamber without changing the precedent that Democrats, for years, have threatened to do.
But they need a plan, first.
That would come from Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the de facto maestro of the reconciliation process. His committee was responsible for drafting the budget resolution that unlocked the process in the upper chamber earlier this year, and he is reportedly eying drafting another resolution in the new year.
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“It would be political malpractice not to do another reconciliation,” Graham told Semafor.
But many Republicans acknowledged just how difficult reconciliation is, especially after the latest exercise that dominated much of Congress’ attention for the first half of the year.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News Digital that “it’s always hard, but it’s an option, and one that we’re not ruling in or ruling out.”
“I would say you have to have a reason to do it, you know,” Thune said. “I mean, you don’t just do reconciliation for the heck of it. You got to have a, you know, a specific purpose. And so we’ll see. I mean, that purpose may, you know, may start getting some traction.”
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Kennedy floated using reconciliation to tackle affordability issues, but some see the painstaking process as an avenue to grapple with another issue that has dominated Congress for several months: healthcare.
Lawmakers left Washington, D.C., without a fix to expiring Obamacare subsidies, effectively setting up a drastic hike in out-of-pocket healthcare costs for millions of Americans. There are bipartisan negotiations in the works to deal with the issue when lawmakers return, but Republicans have a gnawing appetite to drastically change the program.
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told Fox News Digital that Republicans “have to do something” on healthcare.
“Reconciliation is one pathway to do something, but it also limits what we can do,” Banks said. “So we need bipartisan support to pass something that will help everybody.”
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And Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., who has been critical of Republicans’ inability to get a healthcare solution across the line, told Fox News Digital that reconciliation “may be an answer.”
“The healthcare situation is really, it’s a big deal,” Justice said. “It’s more than difficult, you know? And so we need to, we need to try to fix it. That’s for sure.”
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