Trump plans meeting to set agenda for ’18
McConnell, Ryan to help chart path after taxes win
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump plans to start the new year by meeting with Republican congressional leaders to map out the 2018 legislative agenda, the White House said, as the party looks to score more legislative achievements before Washington’s focus shifts to midterm elections.
After returning to Washington from Florida, where he is spending the holidays, Trump will quickly host Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains over the weekend of Jan. 6-7, the White House said.
Spokesmen for Ryan and McConnell have confirmed that they will attend.
The meeting follows the recent enactment of legislation to cut taxes, beginning next year, for corporations and individuals at an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion added to the national debt over 10 years.
The bill marked the first major legislative achievement of 2017 for Trump and congressional Republicans, who made cutting taxes a must-do this year after the Senate failed to close the deal on another top GOP promise: to repeal and replace the Obama-era health care law.
The tax bill ends the requirement that all Americans buy health insurance or risk paying fines, which is a key component of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but leaves intact other features of the health care law. Democrats unanimously voted against the tax bill, which Trump signed at
the White House before he flew to Florida on Friday.
Trump touted the tax plan and other achievements while paying a post-Christmas visit to firefighters in West Palm Beach, Fla. He also called the first responders, stationed at West Palm Beach Fire Rescue, “great people” who do “a fantastic job,” and he thanked them for their service.
Trump said the country is “doing well,” with the stock market and 401(k) retirement plans rising, and said that the U.S. is a “big, beautiful ship” that his administration is turning around.
The agenda for next year, meanwhile, already appears to be packed.
In a tweet earlier this week, Trump predicted that Democrats and Republicans will “eventually come together” to develop a new health care plan. The president is also forecasting unity between the parties on spending to upgrade aging roads, bridges and other transportation needs. The White House has said Trump will unveil his long-awaited infrastructure plan in January.
Ryan, for his part, has talked about overhauling Medicaid and Medicare and other welfare programs, but McConnell has signaled an unwillingness to go that route unless there’s Democratic support for any changes. Trump has also said he wants to pursue “welfare reform” next year because “people are taking advantage of the system.”
Congress will open the year needing to clear a backlog from 2017.
The list includes agreeing on a spending bill by Jan. 19 to avert a partial government shutdown and to boost Pentagon spending. Lawmakers also need to agree on billions of dollars in additional aid to help hurricane victims, lifting the debt ceiling, extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program and extending protections for illegal aliens who were brought to the U.S. as children. Trump tweeted earlier in the year that he was ending the program for the aliens. He gave lawmakers until Jan. 5 to come up with a legislative solution.
Much of the work will need to be done before Republicans shift their focus to the November midterm elections, and retaining their House and Senate majorities.
SLIMMEST MARGINS
Yet there remain profound differences between House and Senate Republicans, all of whom will have to also work with Democrats to achieve some of their legislative goals.
House Republicans, especially conservative members,
have been energized by their ability to rally around the tax overhaul and to limit demands from Democrats — and from the Senate — on the stopgap spending measure.
With the tax plan now law, Ryan has set his sights on another long-held Republican goal: overhauling safety-net standbys such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as welfare and food stamps, and used by millions of poor, disabled and elderly Americans. Ryan also spoke, on Dec. 6., of overhauling Medicare, calling it the “biggest entitlement.”
But there’s the Senate, where Republicans will have the slimmest possible margin in 2018 and the chamber’s rules give minority Democrats significant leverage to bottle up proceedings. McConnell, recognizing that reality, shot down the idea of attempting to jam through Republican-only legislation.
“There’s not much you can
do on a partisan basis in the Senate with 52-48 or at 51-49, which would be the number of us for next year,” McConnell said at a news conference Dec. 22. “I don’t think most of our Democratic colleagues want to do nothing, and there are areas where I think we can get bipartisan agreement.”
McConnell has said his agenda for early 2018 will be dominated by a drive to forge a broad agreement on agency spending for the rest of the fiscal year; a bipartisan measure loosening Dodd-Frank banking rules for smaller institutions; and an immigration overhaul if negotiations between Republicans and Democrats can reach an agreement.
He’s all but rejected the idea of another attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act or taking on the upheaval of welfare programs or socalled entitlement programs like Medicare. McConnell said such attempts can only be successful when both parties agree on the terms
— for example, as in the case of changes to Social Security made under President Ronald Reagan.
“The only way I would be willing to go to entitlement reform — I assume that’s a euphemism for things like Social Security and Medicare — would be if there were Democratic support,” McConnell told the Wall Street Journal.
Indeed, to do so, he would have to get 51 senators to agree on changes to programs like food stamps that help individuals and families facing hardship and to Social Security, which pays benefits to tens of millions of retired workers and their dependents, as well as millions more disabled workers and others.
That means Republicans could need help from Democrats even on bills moving through the budget reconciliation process to fast-track passage with only a simple majority. More contentious measures would be likely to face Democratic filibusters.
Ryan, on the other hand, and many of his House Republicans, see overhauling social programs as the essential next step after their rewrite of the U.S. tax code. Ryan contends that overhauling entitlement programs and increasing economic growth by lowering taxes are both necessary to pay off the federal debt.
“We will get back at reforming these entitlements,” Ryan told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum last week. “We’re going to take on welfare reform, which is another big entitlement program, where we’re basically paying people — able-bodied people — not to work.”
As a candidate, Trump promised repeatedly that he wouldn’t cut Medicare, which provides health insurance for older Americans, or Social Security. Other safety-net programs may be fair game, though. The president said in November that “we’re looking very strongly at welfare reform, and that’ll all take place right after taxes.” And, Ryan has said Republicans are mak- ing an impression on Trump when it comes to Medicare changes.
Mandatory spending — that is, funds not appropriated by Congress — on programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid represents more than half of U.S. government outlays.
In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made clear she doesn’t plan to help Republicans hunt for savings in those areas. Pelosi pushed back hard on the Republican fiscal argument of using the revenue lost to their tax cuts as an excuse to shrink the size of government.
“This is part of the ‘starve the beast’ value system that the Republicans have,” Pelosi said Dec. 21. “They do not believe in governance, so any public role in the health and well-being of the American people is on their hit list.”
The ideological divisions are even more complicated when it comes to immigration.
McConnell said Dec. 20 that he’d commit to putting on the floor in January legislation combining deportation protections for the 800,000 young illegal aliens with a border security package. That’s contingent, though, on bipartisan negotiations yielding a deal “that can be widely supported by both political parties and actually become law.”
Ryan hasn’t committed to this timetable. He leads a chamber where conservatives will balk at the deportation protections if they include a pathway to citizenship for those aliens. Some House Republicans also seek more conservative immigration law changes than any Senate deal is likely to embrace.
Although Ryan has said he wants to provide some kind of legal certainty for illegal aliens who were protected under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, he’s played down any sense of urgency — saying he needs to find out where his own conference is on this issue before he can negotiate with the other side.
“Do we have to have a DACA resolution? Yes, we do,” Ryan told reporters in November. “The deadline’s March, as far as I understand it. We’ve got other deadlines in front of that, like fiscal year deadlines and appropriation deadlines.”