Civil War: Steve Bannon and House Speaker Mike Johnson represent dueling factions of the President’s coalition. Asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he supported a millionaire’s tax, President Trump replied, “I think it would be very disruptive because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country.” Credit: Associated Press
Politics
Budget Reconciliation Could Be the Beginning of the End of the Republican Party
Prioritizing extreme deficit reduction is forcing Republicans to take positions that threaten the bonds of their coalition. by Bill Scher, April 25, 2025
Civil War: Steve Bannon and House Speaker Mike Johnson represent dueling factions of the President’s coalition. Asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he supported a millionaire’s tax, President Trump replied, “I think it would be very disruptive because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country.” Credit: Associated Press
“Presidential campaigns are like MRIs for the soul,” said David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former campaign strategist. I believe a corollary is that the budget reconciliation process is like an MRI for the soul of a political party.
The filibuster-proof process often begins with assumptions of party unity on major issues members and activists, only to discover fissures festering under the surface.
In 2017, Republicans found out the hard way they were not united around repealing the Affordable Care Act. After that reconciliation bill dramatically failed on the Senate floor with John McCain’s famous thumbs down, Republicans recovered with passage of a different reconciliation bill on the issue that had long kept the GOP together: tax cuts.
Eight years later, Donald Trump is again president, Republicans are again in control of both chambers, and they again struggle to reach a consensus around health care. The House budget resolution—nonbinding legislation but a necessary step in the reconciliation process—instructed the committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid to come up with $880 billion in spending cuts. But the Senate version did not follow suit, and several House Republicans signaled they wouldn’t vote for Medicaid cuts that large in the final bill.
It is not surprising that Republicans still lack unity on health care. The Affordable Care Act remains popular, but improving health care is a complicated subject, and complexity is not a strong suit of the modern GOP. Trump ran in 2024 claiming to have only “concepts of a plan” regarding health care, an unintentionally farcical acknowledgment that there was little political upside in offering health care policy details.
