It says something about the state of the Republican Congress that their big feat this week was getting the House to hold votes. Dissident members of the House Freedom Caucus were so adamant about passage of the voter suppression bill known as the SAVE Act that they had shut down the floor for the prior two weeks. The unlocking was secured after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) agreed to put a version of SAVE into a “reconciliation 3.0” package the party has been working on for months.
This bill, the last hope of any meaningful legislation before the midterms, narrowed from something as broad as the Big Beautiful Bill–complete with tax cuts, budget trims, and anti-fraud measures—down to glorified emergency supplemental funding, the kind of thing that used to pass with significant bipartisan support until the Trump administration poisoned the legislative process.
But just getting the House to squeak through reconciliation, which they did on a 216-214 vote on Wednesday with only three Republicans voting no, holds no guarantee of success in the Senate, and the tricky thing for Republicans is that all the bills they want to close the year with are inter-related. So failure on one is likely to collapse the whole enterprise and leave the party with nothing to show to voters who already have soured on them.
Read: The SAVE Act comes for everythingThe reconciliation package contains $73 billion to backfill the cost of the disastrous war in Iran (split up into $60 billion for the Pentagon and $13 billion for intelligence programs), $12 billion for farmers who are still struggling due to Trump tariffs, and $10 billion in what is being described as election aid. Grants in this amount would be given to states that implement voter ID mandates and proof-of-citizenship provisions. This is hardly the SAVE Act, which has several other provisions and doesn’t rely on bribing states. But even President Trump acknowledged the impossibility of getting that done, endorsing the reconciliation package by saying that it at least would “get AS MUCH of THE SAVE AMERICA ACT as possible.”
The omissions in reconciliation are enough to anger just about every Republican.
That was good enough to get the House unfrozen. But the omissions in reconciliation are enough to anger just about every Republican. Self-styled fiscal hawks don’t like that none of it is paid for; frontline Republicans didn’t want to vote for any more spending cuts before the election. The House Ways and Means Committee wanted to add more tax changes but also came up empty. There has been some talk floated about a fourth reconciliation bill after the midterms to get to these priorities, but in addition to being yet another empty promise of fiscal responsibility, it’s logistically impossible, unless the idea is that a fiscal year 2028 bill could be marked up at the end of 2026, before the FY2027 budget is even complete.
Senate Republicans want no part of reconciliation because, under their process, they would have to give Democrats votes on amendments that it would be very unpopular for Republicans to oppose. And the Senate’s new Budget Committee chair, Ron Johnson (R-WI), hates the lack of offsets more than anyone, and is now in a position to sink the whole thing.
The SAVE portion, by the way, probably doesn’t have a bare majority in the Senate, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) public opposition. And it likely still violates Senate procedures for budget reconciliation, because its purpose is clearly to suppress votes in the states and is not budgetary. So if the Senate parliamentarian dumps SAVE, it’s unlikely that the House would pass a bill without it, and we’re back where we’ve started.
Meanwhile, a bill that primarily funds one of the most unpopular wars in American history is not a winning campaign message, either. Yet many Republicans, including the president, actually want an extra $350 billion for the Pentagon, not $60 billion, and some are opposing reconciliation on those terms.
Warhawks could get the rest through normal appropriations, but they know that avenue is stuck. In fact, on Tuesday the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government from October to December, anticipating the inability to get a budget deal. In addition, the annual must-pass national defense authorization bill (NDAA) is also dependent on what the numbers are in both the base budget and the reconciliation package.
Senate Republican Leader John Thune (R-SD) said that he wouldn’t bring the same continuing resolution to the floor, because the Senate wants some additional spending in there and is working with Democrats on finalizing. Thune also said he would hold off work on any budget resolution until after the August recess, which would give almost no time to pass that and then get the reconciliation bill done before the midterms. Since one of the big priorities in the reconciliation bill involves getting voter-ID measures in place for those elections, it essentially nullifies its impact.
The House also got their version of the NDAA passed on Wednesday thanks to six Democratic crossover votes. That bill includes the SAVE Act, which rather remarkably now gives SAVE bipartisan cover. But the inclusion of SAVE makes it dead on arrival in the Senate, and contingent on whatever happens in reconciliation. A defense policy bill historically requires negotiations between the House and Senate; it’s likely a post-midterm action item.
House may have “done their job” in advance of a five-week break (!), limiting defections on the continuing resolution, the reconciliation bill, and the NDAA. But they didn’t come close to presenting products that have a chance of becoming law, which is kind of the point of Congress. Moreover, they have put every Republican in a tough race on the record on supporting the war that is increasing everyone’s gas prices.
