When President Trump coined the phrase “one, big, beautiful bill” to describe his legislative strategy, there’s one word he left out: “complicated.” For House and Senate leaders, it’s been a two-month dance just to get on the same page about the broad strokes of a plan to implement Trump’s agenda. It’s like writing the rules for a game you haven’t even played yet. And this game, a “mega-MAGA” Twister of tax relief, debt limits, budget cuts, defense and border spending, offsets, baselines, and mind-numbing procedure, is winner-take-all.

Turns out, electing Trump was the easy part. Putting some of his biggest priorities into law is a different story. For weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) have been working around the clock, trying to juggle the party’s personalities with the White House’s non-negotiables — and somehow make it all squeeze through the Senate’s rigid rules and the House’s aggressive timeline.

So far, the two chambers have come to the table with very different perspectives on make-or-break items — from how much fat to cut from government to whether America can afford permanent tax cuts. Right now, the Senate’s main goal is to catch up to the House, which approved its framework three weeks ago. Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is doing his best to get his chamber there, finally publishing the text of a compromise bill on Wednesday.

In it, he gives senators a bit more wiggle room on how much spending to cut (the House insisted on a floor of $1.5-2 trillion), while also clearing the fiscal brush necessary to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent and raise the debt ceiling. “The Senate Plan has my Complete and Total Support,” the president posted when the language was released. “Every Republican, House and Senate, must UNIFY. We need to pass it IMMEDIATELY!”

Of course, passing it “immediately” means enduring one of the truly entertaining traditions of the Senate (unless you’re a staffer): the vote-a-rama. One of the conditions of budget reconciliation — which is the path Republicans are choosing so they can enact Trump’s agenda with a simple majority — is that senators can offer an unlimited number of unrelated, off-topic amendments without worrying about filibusters. That usually means the minority takes the opportunity to make a political point or force the other party to cast a vote on an uncomfortable issue.

It also, veterans of the chamber will tell you, takes a lonnnnnng time. “It’s a total and unequivocal nightmare of epic proportions,” Jim Manley, a former spokesman for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, insisted with the drama of someone who’s suffered through it. “For those working in the Capitol, it is an extraordinarily stressful time. Normally cheerful individuals become snarling animals as more and more votes are taken,” he reflected. And what’s so frustrating, he said, is that “it’s largely a meaningless exercise.” “The amendments are BS. If they’re designed to do anything, they’re designed to craft 15-second digital attack ads.”

The members either pretend to hate it or actually do, but the stories that come out of vote-a-ramas are legendary. In a chamber that almost never works on Fridays, it’s the closest thing to a Senate sleepover there is. While the political all-nighters are painful for both parties, they always seem to produce funny anecdotes like back-room poker games, stealth happy hours, regional food wars, and coffee — lots of it. There are the iconic images — like former Senator Joe Manchin throwing pepperoni rolls at reporters in 2015 or the parade of mattresses wheeled in for sleepy senators in 2017.

Right now, the hazing is scheduled to begin Friday night and last until who-knows-when. Technically, it could go on until one party cries uncle and stops offering amendments. The most recent vote-a-rama, in February, lasted until 4:51 a.m,

Once the painful process is over, and the Senate finally passes its version of a plan, the cold hard reality is that it’s just the beginning. The House and Senate will have boarded the same train, but it won’t have left the station yet. “It’s a meaningful step,” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) agreed, “but it’s a baby step, folks,” he said, tempering expectations. “It’s just a blueprint,” Kennedy said. “The real work starts after we do this.”

After a two-week Easter break, the really uncomfortable conversations begin: negotiating every single detail of the final reconciliation package and getting almost every Republican in both chambers to agree. Or, as congressional leadership might call it, torture. While the GOP might have hung together long enough to get a skeletal outline done, that’s nothing compared to sitting down and going through each and every number, arriving at one that satisfies 270 different people. Already, House members are planting flags in the ground about their “must-haves.”

As FRC’s Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena González told The Washington Stand, “Since this budget resolution is designed to pass with only Republican votes, it’s illuminating different interests in the Republican Party. Defense hawks in both the House and Senate want the Senate’s higher ceiling on Pentagon spending ($150 billion vs. the House ceiling of $100 billion) to eventually prevail. President Trump wants his signature tax cuts from 2017 to be permanent and for Congress to raise the debt limit.”

Then, of course, there are the fiscal hawks, who González points out “are worried about the deficit and debt and generally favor the House language that ties a $4 trillion debt ceiling to at least $2 trillion in overall spending cuts — while at the same time, other Republicans are worried that a $4 trillion debt ceiling could be hit before next year’s election (triggering a second debt ceiling deadline that could force Republicans to compromise with Democrats on policy and spending right before an election) and therefore favor the Senate’s $5 trillion debt ceiling.”

And the clock is ticking. For Congress to hit Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline, House and Senate committees would only have until May 9 to produce their pieces of the budget package, Quena warns, and until May 16 for the Finance panel’s debt limit increase.

In other words, it’s a lot to sort through in a short amount of time. The one silver lining for the GOP is that Democrats, at this point, “have no leverage in all of this,” González continued, “because a budget reconciliation process can be passed, albeit very slowly, on a simple majority vote, so without any Democrats.” Their sole focus, he explained, “is basically trying to gum up the works, force painful votes along the way, and generally rooting for blood.”

And right now, there’s plenty to go around. House and Senate Republicans are at very different places when it comes to spending cuts. Conservatives like Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) agree with the House that now is the time to go big. “My sticking point has always been spending, spending, spending,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “… [W]e don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. So are we willing to fix it? … We went from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to probably about $7.3 trillion this year. That’s a 63% increase [in spending]. There’s no justification for that. A reasonable pre-pandemic baseline would be no more than $6.5 trillion.”

Trump, the senator said, is committed to getting America back to those pre-COVID levels. “And I think, even more importantly, working with us to develop a detailed and rigorous process to actually achieve it. We’ve never had a process to control spending,” Johnson pointed out. “You may be interested to know the appropriation committees were established to control the big spending authorizing committees. Well, that didn’t work. The Budget Act didn’t work. Simpson-Bowles didn’t work. The Budget Control Act didn’t work. So I proposed a process very similar to a private sector budget review process, where you literally go line by line,” he explained.

“I would recommend involving senators, House members, and the administration,” the senator suggested. “And bring administration officials with their budget gurus and CFOs and literally go [through all] 2,400 individual expenditure lines in the 2025 proposed budget. We have to do that work. Nobody ever wants to do that.”

And honestly, Elon Musk’s team has put Congress in a great position to do that. “DOGE can be very useful,” Johnson observed. “Under reconciliation, we can only address mandatory spending, which is bizarre just in and of itself. So that leaves discretionary spending that has to be passed with Senate Democrats’ help. They won’t.” So he’s pushing an old process that several leaders are dusting off called “rescission” that lets the president claw back spending that’s already been approved. “I think they’re going to move forward on this as well. My recommendation was at least one rescission package a month where Elon and his DOGE group basically bundles up billions of dollars worth of spending rescissions, headlined by the most egregious examples of wasteful and abusive spending.”

At the end of the day, Johnson reminded people, “President Trump is a businessperson. If [your managers] say, ‘Hey, listen, I’ll let you grow your budget by the number of customers you’re serving and inflation — and you come back six years later and [those] budgets are 10% higher than that, you’d go, ‘What are you doing?! Knock it down back to the constraints I told you!’ That’d be a one-minute conversation, and it would be done. This would be easy.”

But unfortunately, Congress has let things get out of hand — with a big assist from the Biden administration. Now, as Speaker Johnson told Perkins, “It has to be Republicans who are [the] grown-ups” and govern responsibly.

Hammering out a bill that can pass both chambers’ wafer-thin majorities is the definition of “challenging,” but the Louisianan is “very optimistic about what we need to achieve over the days and weeks ahead of us.” He understands, “This is our opportunity to deliver what will be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation truly in the history of the Congress and our nation. And working together, we will get this done.”

Well, Perkins replied, “If anybody can defy history, it seems to be your speakership.” Let’s hope that holds for what’s certain to be a bumpy couple of months.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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