Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and while they largely agree on a shared set of funding and tax priorities for the federal budget, they have differing opinions about how to arrive at those goals. Specifically, they continue to debate whether they should try to pass everything altogether in one massive bill or instead seek to prioritize some items for a more urgent bill and then follow up with a second bill shortly after.
Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Star Parker reviews the GOP debate on budget reconciliation and reminds Americans that while the legislative process is sometimes ugly, it is also a necessary function of our constitutional republic — if, as Benjamin Franklin said, we can keep it.
The following is an excerpt from the above video:
Our legislative process has been compared to the sausage factory, so it’s not pleasant to watch. It’s messy and it’s chaotic, but it ultimately produces results, and the republic endures.
The first month of the Trump administration has been very productive, but there has also been a lot of chaos. Things have been chaotic in Congress, especially in the House of Representatives, but the sausage factory is grinding forward. We’re in trouble, and they’re trying to fix us as a country. The Senate has passed a budget resolution, the first step in providing funds for the border security, funds for energy development, funds for national security, and they are proposing to offset these expenditures and to pass a second budget resolution to facilitate extensions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. We need those and [to] enact even some new tax reductions that President Trump proposed during his campaign.
It’s really getting sloppy. It’s getting really tense, but the House is pushing one big, beautiful bill to advance all these objectives and to achieve deficit reduction. It’s what the people voted for, it’s what they’re trying to do. And ultimately, the House and the Senate will need to pass the same budget resolution, or two budget resolutions, and it’s likely to be really messy getting into that result. Budget resolutions are like blueprints, so they are just the first step in the process.