{"id":625,"date":"2026-07-20T11:37:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanindustryreview.com\/?p=625"},"modified":"2026-07-20T11:37:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:37:25","slug":"how-congress-is-losing-its-paths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanindustryreview.com\/?p=625","title":{"rendered":"How Congress is losing its path(s)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Hoping for a few final wins before the midterms, Republicans are going for reconciliation \u2014 again. That\u2019s partly because other legislative paths to President Donald Trump\u2019s desk are disappearing.<\/p>\n

Read more Critics mount offensive against change to federal grant rules<\/a><\/p>\n

They\u2019ll spend a good chunk of this week on plans for a third round of the filibuster-proof budget process, this time for a $95 billion package that would fund the Iran war, farm aid and voter ID measures.<\/p>\n

No one said it would be easy. As House Republicans pushed ahead with their blueprint, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. \u2014 who would have to lead his chamber through another grueling round of Byrd rule fights and intense overnight voting sessions \u2014 wouldn\u2019t make any guarantees and called it a \u201cvery uneven path.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., don\u2019t have many other options if they want to grant Trump\u2019s legislative wishes. The lonely road to reconciliation has been decades in the making, said Molly Reynolds, vice president and director of governance studies at Brookings.<\/p>\n

In years past, lawmakers may have looked at a president\u2019s request for extra money and passed a supplemental spending bill or folded it into a stopgap. Now, \u201cfor lots of very good reasons, people don\u2019t see that as a tenable path,\u201d Reynolds said on a recent episode of Roll Call\u2019s Political Theater podcast.<\/p>\n

Recent decades have hardly been all rosy. Instead of advancing stand-alone appropriations bills, Congress has relied on omnibus measures or stopgaps to fund the government. But appropriating was still \u201cthe most functional part of Congress\u2019 work every year,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s \u201cbuckling even further under the weight of various political conflicts, and particularly political conflict between Congress and the president,\u201d she said. The Trump administration has ignored congressional directives on spending, undercutting the power of the purse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s all created the situation where we\u2019re just kind of stuck,\u201d Reynolds said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Republicans used budget reconciliation earlier this year amid a bitter clash over funding the Department of Homeland Security, sidestepping the appropriations process as Democrats warned it could come back to haunt them when they return to the minority.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., have not been able to reach an agreement on top-line spending limits for fiscal 2027. In anticipation of missing the Sept. 30 deadline, Johnson is already teeing up a short-term funding extension into December that the House could consider this week.<\/p>\n

Collins told reporters last week it is her \u201cview that we should not be using reconciliation \u2014 we should work through the normal appropriations process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump backs newly appointed Darline Graham for full Senate term<\/a><\/p>\n

Republicans, however, aren\u2019t the only ones to lean on what Reynolds likes to call the \u201cone neat trick.\u201d During the Biden administration, when Democrats had a similarly slim majority in Congress, they used reconciliation to land priorities that included, among other things, COVID-19 relief money.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to deny the appeal of a filibuster-proof journey through the Senate. Under a 1974 law, the reconciliation process allows for fast-track consideration of certain proposals to align spending, revenue and debt with budget targets.<\/p>\n

The the House will attempt to adopt this week includes an eclectic mix of \u201cinstructions,\u201d including $60 billion for the House Armed Services Committee, $12 billion for the Agriculture Committee and $10 billion for the Administration Committee \u2014 and even $13 billion for the Intelligence Committee, which Reynolds said is a first.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some ways, this is the logical next step in what they have done to the reconciliation process,\u201d Reynolds said. \u201cIt is sort of turning into this way to solve a particular political problem that a majority party has at a given moment in time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some are already talking about a \u201creconciliation 4.0\u201d effort, however far-fetched, this time with extra funding for the Pentagon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last week, in a sobering sign of the times, senators couldn\u2019t muster 60 votes to proceed to the usually bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act \u2014 one of the last reliable vehicles left for lawmakers to hang their legislative priorities on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we take one of these trains and say it\u2019s not leaving the station, that has broader implications for the rest of the legislative process and other things that members really want to get done,\u201d Reynolds said.<\/p>\n

Another option that may be narrowing? The path of personality. Reynolds pointed to the deal-making mentality of senators like the late Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly on July 11.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you just watch the institution from the outside, sometimes you can miss the degree to which things that happen really do depend on whether people like each other and whether people want to work together and whether people think that someone else is a fun person to have in the room,\u201d Reynolds said.<\/p>\n

Read more HHS research agency ends funding for dozens of health studies<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve lost some of those kinds of people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hoping for a few final wins before the midterms, Republicans are going for reconciliation \u2014 again. That\u2019s partly because other legislative paths to President Donald Trump\u2019s desk are disappearing. They\u2019ll spend a good chunk of this week on plans for a third round of the filibuster-proof budget process, this time for a $95 billion package […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Congress is losing its path(s) - American Industry Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanindustryreview.com\/?p=625\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Congress is losing its path(s) - American Industry Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hoping for a few final wins before the midterms, Republicans are going for reconciliation \u2014 again. 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