Trump's legislative tariff squeeze - Punchbowl News

*OBBB 2.0? *Passing a second reconciliation bill this year was always going to be hard.

But now **it’s going to be **nearly impossible.

*A growing chorus *of House and Senate Republicans want to use the fast-track budget reconciliation process to codify Trump’s global tariff regime following last week’s Supreme Court blockbuster decision.

*Here’s the problem: *There’s no chance that Speaker *Mike Johnson *and Senate Majority Leader *John Thune *can get enough Republican votes to pull this off. The math and the politics just don’t work. Don’t forget that Thune himself has expressed deep skepticism about broad-based tariffs like the ones Trump has doubled down on.

Yet if the GOP leadership tries to enact health-care policy or send more money to the Pentagon via reconciliation, there’s a group of hard-line Republicans itching to slip new tariffs into that package. Trump is sure to use his State of the Union address tonight to call on Congress to pass a new health care bill — which can only be done through reconciliation.

*This presents *GOP leaders with a serious dilemma.

*The bull case *for including tariff provisions in reconciliation is that they raise gobs of revenue to reduce the deficit or fund other priorities. The bear case is that a good chunk of Hill Republicans are deeply skeptical of their economic and political utility.

That tricky position *is embodied in the divergent lines of thinking of Johnson and Republicans like Sen. *Bernie Moreno *(Ohio) and Rep. *Jodey Arrington (Texas).

Moreno told reporters Monday that it’s an “indictment of the Republican Party” if GOP lawmakers can’t legislate tariffs through a party-line bill, arguing that Trump’s trade wars benefit working-class Americans.

*“I’m hopeful that *my colleagues, we can get to work on creating a reconciliation bill that does other things … but in that same bill would have a major pay-for, which would be to put these tariffs into legislation,” Moreno said.

Arrington, the House Budget Committee chair, said Republicans need to pass another reconciliation bill in order to address health care, housing affordability and fraud in federal programs.

*But after *last week’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Trump’s use of emergency trade authority to impose tariffs, Arrington belives any new reconciliation package should also codify tariff rates from Trump’s trade deals or the president’s across-the-board base tariffs.

*“There are other *things that I would expect we would include in reconciliation. Now this is just another piece of that,” Arrington said in an interview. “I’d call it the America First trade agenda.”

*The GOP reality. *Just listen to what Johnson told us Monday afternoon on the difficulty of finding GOP unity on tariffs, even with Trump pressing rank-and-file Republicans to support such a move.

*“It’s going to be, I think, *a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs on the legislative side,” the speaker said. “And so, that is why I think you see so much of the attention on the executive side, the executive branch, of what they’re doing and how they’re reacting to the ruling and all the rest.”

Don’t forget that in the Senate, any reconciliation bill comes with a painful vote-a-rama at the end of the process. Democrats can force votes on politically uncomfortable topics just months before the midterms.

The eternally optimistic Johnson is one of the only leaders in the Capitol who still holds out hope for another reconciliation bill. Other top House Republicans are far more bearish.

*This is sure to be a topic *of conversation at the House GOP’s Elected Leadership Committee’s retreat this weekend in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The full House Republican Conference is expected to discuss ideas for reconciliation at the party’s legislative getaway, March 9-11, in Doral, Fla. Trump is slated to be there too.

*Republicans’ hurdles. *Even beyond tariffs, Republicans don’t agree on what sort of reconciliation bill they want to put together. The midterm elections are growing closer. House GOP moderates are fed up and staging revolts. Trump’s poll numbers are bad and getting worse, even as he threatens a major military conflict with Iran.

In the Senate, there’s hefty skepticism about another reconciliation attempt.

Long before the recent tariff mess, Thune had expressed doubts — both publicly and privately — about the wisdom of doing another reconciliation bill. At the same time, Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was holding planning meetings to do just that.

*The “Reconciliation 2.0” *fervor intensified during last fall’s record-setting government shutdown. Conservatives approached Thune privately to advocate for another reconciliation bill as a way to neutralize Democrats’ health care demands. Their pitch was that Democrats would never agree to a health care bill at a 60-vote threshold because they wanted to use the issue against Republicans, so the only logical avenue was reconciliation.

But the Senate parliamentarian had already ruled that some of the conservatives’ health care ideas didn’t comply with the chamber’s rules for reconciliation. Plus, Thune has declared repeatedly that he’d oppose voting to overrule the parliamentarian.