House Speaker Mike Johnson is gearing up for a budget reconciliation process that will seek to codify a lot of the Trump fiscal agenda.
Now that Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, party leaders are working to assemble a bill that will force through this agenda as part of the reconciliation process – meaning that they can bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate and get a bill through with a simple majority.
Both parties have used reconciliation in order to pass policy agenda items. Among the more recent attempts at it, Democrats got the falsely-named “Inflation Reduction Act” through the process with the help of then-senator Joe Manchin. But now, the tables have turned and Republicans see an opportunity to codify tax cuts, reduced spending, Medicaid reform, and more in a bill that will not require a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
On Wednesday morning, Johnson joined me on Acadiana’s Morning News, and we got to talk about budget reconciliation, DOGE, executive power, and the group Boyz II Men (Johnson and I are both fans, and the Speaker noted that they “wrote half the soundtrack of our lives”).
Johnson and President Donald Trump are on the same page, with the Speaker noting that Trump is still calling for “a big, beautiful bill.” Both the President and the Speaker agree that said bill, the reconciliation bill we should be seeing soon, is the way to go to make necessary reforms in government spending.
You can listen to the Speaker’s full interview with me and my morning co-host, Jamie Angelle, below. Acadiana’s Morning News is live every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. (CT) on NewsTalk 96.5 KPEL in Lafayette, Louisiana.
