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Late last year, there was a fair amount of chatter from congressional Republicans about doing a second gigantic budget-reconciliation bill like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer. The idea was that the GOP could treat its base to some nice right-wing policy treats without having to so much as speak to those nasty Radical Left Democrats. By design, the opposition party would be entirely left out of plans for approving such legislation on up-or-down party-line votes in both houses of Congress.
But as the calendar turned to 2026, enthusiasm for OBBBA 2.0 declined, partly because of fragile Republican control of the House but mostly because the midterm elections are approaching, in which a big new bag of right-wing policy treats might be toxic among swing voters. For the most part, as Donald Trump himself said in an interview last month, they had what they needed to get through to November and were focused on agitating the air about “affordability” and trying to make mass deportation respectable again (the twin messages of Trump’s State of the Union address).
But now, suddenly there’s a war on, which Democrats almost universally oppose, and there’s renewed interest, particularly in the House, in a budget-reconciliation bill as a way to pay for Trump’s Iran adventure and perhaps some other base-pleasing measures Democrats hate, as Punchbowl News reports:
House Republican leaders decided at their Florida retreat last weekend that they’re going to pursue a second reconciliation package this year, according to multiple sources who attended the gathering …
The big problem here is that House GOP conservatives would almost certainly demand that every penny of a reconciliation package be offset by spending cuts. And the GOP leadership has no clue if or how they will find cuts that’ll pass muster with House Republican moderates …
GOP moderates would love to do something about health care costs, but it would be very challenging to get agreement on that among Republicans. For example, the Trump administration wants Congress to address “most favored nation” drug pricing efforts, but that policy has GOP skeptics in the House and Senate.
Addressing fraud in government programs sounds good to Republicans, but some of their proposals wouldn’t meet reconciliation rules. Others might cut spending so much that they spook moderates.
“Addressing fraud,” of course, is code for making cuts in domestic-spending programs, particularly in health care, the subject of Trump’s recent demagogic crusade against alleged Somali-immigrant fleecing of the hardworking American taxpayer (the pretext, in fact, for the deadly, now-abandoned ICE “surge” in Minnesota). So just as the OBBBA’s Medicaid cuts were advertised as an attack on “waste, fraud and abuse,” a potential second wave of cuts in health-care or child-care programs could be advertised as going after “illegal-alien crime networks.” That does not, however, guarantee spending cuts will be any more popular than they were last year.
Indeed, you can easily imagine Democrats licking their chops at the prospect of a single package of Republican party-line legislation that would “cut Medicaid to pay for Trump’s war.” And if Republicans add in more money for DHS in lieu of the funding bill currently being stalled by Democrats, the indictment would read, “Cutting Medicaid to pay for Trump’s war and ICE.” It’s pretty likely this message would poll well.
The biggest problem with going the reconciliation route is Johnson’s tiny margin of control in the House; at this point, he cannot lose more than one vote. Passing the OBBBA was a miracle of party discipline in a nonelection year. Pulling it off again with voters watching closely and the administration engaged in highly unpopular conduct here and abroad would be a very tall order. But without it, Republicans will have to deal with Democrats to overcome a Senate filibuster on just about anything they want, and bipartisanship is even more intolerable to the Trump-era GOP than losing elections.
