A sweeping election victory on Nov. 5 means Republicans will have control of the House, Senate, and the White House come January. Capturing this trifecta, however, was just the beginning of conservatives’ fight to save the country.
Now comes the much harder task: conservatives actually have to govern. Republicans, animated by President-elect Donald Trump’s winning agenda, will have to work at record pace to get the changes the American people want through the slow-turning gears of Washington, D.C.
To preview the incoming Congress, I spoke to Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, on this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.” Walker has nearly a decade of experience working for the House of Representatives under his belt and is now tasked with ensuring conservative grassroots priorities are attended to on Capitol Hill.
While Republicans have a strong majority in the Senate, it is nowhere near the 60 votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster. Nevertheless, there are some mechanisms that exist for the Senate to circumvent the filibuster and pass their agenda with a simple majority vote in the upper chamber. And Republicans are planning to put one of these mechanisms, budget reconciliation, to use to pass large portions of Trump’s agenda.
In this upcoming budget reconciliation process, Walker told me that “the American people have demanded that [Congress] go big.”
“[The American people] don’t just want a bill dealing with tax reform,” Walker continued. “They want substantial change to the way the government functions. They want the border closed. They want inflation to come down. They want crime rates to drop. They want folks to start acting in a way that is not weaponizing government agencies against the people. They want spying on American citizens to stop. They want their votes to count and illegals to not be allowed to vote in federal elections or even state and local elections.”
To no surprise, the American people actually want the policies they voted for in November to be enacted, Walker suggested. “Regardless of which strategy,” Republicans in Congress go with, Walker said, “it needs to be a big and massive piece of policy change.”
The challenge to faithfully enacting Trump’s agenda, however, is that Congress “in many ways is a broken institution,” Walker claimed. For too long, Congress has forfeited its responsibilities. It has failed to attend to the hard work of really legislating. It has forgone prudently appropriating taxpayer dollars and opted for omnibuses instead. It has forked over the bulk of its powers to the administrative state of the executive branch.
But, now, the American people are prepared to hold Congress accountable. “The American electorate is awake now and engaged in a way that I don’t know that I’ve seen in my entire political career,” Walker told me. “The American people care and are paying attention and are more knowledgeable about what’s going on than they have been since I’ve worked in this town. And so I don’t think that they’re going to let this kind of stuff slide.”
“There are ways to get this done. Congress, in a moment of clarity, can do a whole lot of things really freaking fast,” Walker added.
Walker and I also dive into the government spending fight. While the episode was recorded before the Dec. 20 government funding deadline, we discussed why conservatives were aiming for the continuing resolution (which typically conservatives are opposed to) to expire in March.
The reason is rather simple: Any full-year spending agreement would attempt to handcuff Trump and Republicans for the next year, and potentially beyond.
“?Heritage Action, months ago, when the last continuing resolution was passed, we went to the Speaker’s office, we went to rank and file members, we went to Senate offices, and we pleaded with them that in a lame duck session of Congress—Dec. 20 is when this is going to come up—they cannot and should not pass government funding in negotiations with Democrats that control the Senate to essentially hamstring the Trump administration for the first seven or eight months of his administration,” Walker said.
“The best opportunity that we have coming out of this, whether it be an omnibus spending bill that gets to October… or a continuing another continuing resolution that gets to March, that latter option is the best because Trump will be able to come in,” Walker continued. “It will be one of the first opportunities that Trump and his administration have to start implementing at least incremental changes in the way that we fund certain programs or, importantly, not fund a lot of others. And so, we want him to have that opportunity.”
The best chance for conservatives to achieve their policy goals and restore fiscal sanity is to pass a continuing resolution through March and allow conservatives to control the process quickly after taking the reins of power.
But, whether its government spending or budget reconciliation, the margins Republicans will have next Congress are incredibly slim. Making sure Republicans actually deliver will sometimes require using the big guns.
“The best tool that you have in the toolbox to get everybody on board is to use the platform of the President of the United States,” Walker said. “And with Donald Trump, someone who’s just won the popular vote, he has a clear mandate from the American people, and he has an entire apparatus around him now that I think will put real hard power and press hard power on these members to get in line.”
So, if you thought this Congress was something to behold, just wait until January.
