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John:
Hello from Capitol Hill.
As expected, President Trump’s imposition of reciprocal, across the board tariffs is dominating the news cycle this week. After decades of imbalanced, abusive trade deals withering America’s middle class and prosperity, President Trump’s “Liberation Day” came. A plethora of arguments on tariffs and globalized trade abound - the Senate even passed a measure to terminate tariffs that affect North America. After serious drops across stock indexes over the weekend, and petitions from scores of countries to negotiate, the President instated a reprieve for countries that did not retaliate. However, he hiked China’s tariffs to 125%. The market is currently experiencing massive rebounds.
Concurrently to the Trump tariffs, Congress is working on the legislative vehicle for implementing some key Trump campaign promises. Over the weekend, the Senate conducted a so-called vote-a-rama on the House’s budget resolution, where Senators can get votes on an unlimited amount of amendments. These marathon voting sessions end once the Senate itself succumbs to exhaustion. The budget resolution ended up passing 51-48, including a $5 trillion debt limit increase, the renewal of President Trump’s signature tax cuts, and more. A bicameral fight is brewing over an order-of-magnitude difference between the chambers’ desired amount of budgetary offsets; $4 billion in the Senate and at least $1.5 trillion in the House. With Reps. Fine and Patronis joining Congress this week, Speaker Johnson can now afford to lose three votes - a number of House members have balked at the prospect of voting for the Senate budget.
Speaker Johnson adjourned the House last week after an unexpected loss on the rules package intended to govern Rep. Luna’s proxy voting rule change. Proxy voting is when a member of Congress authorizes another member of Congress to vote on their behalf when the original member is absent from the House floor. This kind of voting came to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Democrats extended proxy voting privileges to all members: Republicans were highly critical of abuses of proxy voting. When Republicans took control of the House, they reinstated in-person voting requirements.
House leadership attempted to kill the Luna resolution by wrapping it into a rules package tied to popular bills (including the SAVE Act) such that supporting the rule would kill the proxy voting measure. Luna won over several of her colleagues, defeating the rule and forcing the issue. The House got “locked down” in a colloquial sense, leading to negotiations between Luna and Johnson. This week, the two seem to have reached an agreement wherein Johnson permits vote pairing (a practice where one member sacrifices their vote for another when they cannot make the vote) and Luna stands down her effort to codify the proxy voting rule. These developments cleared out the House’s work last week and resulted in Luna leaving the House Freedom Caucus - however, the House is now engaging on the Senate budget resolution that was freshly delivered over the weekend.
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One More Thing
Sincerely,
Jake Chebowski
Government Relations
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