Washington Times Weekly: Tariff whiplash

Hi, I’m George Gerbo, and welcome to Washington Times Weekly, where we get a chance to sit down with our reporters and dig into their coverage of the latest news and events. 

Joining me this time is Washington Times national politics reporter, Susan Ferrechio. 

[GERBO] Let’s start on Capitol Hill. This House budget resolution that has finally passed after a week plus now going back and forth of, will the House agree with the Senate plan? Will there be more extensive cuts, like President Trump has wanted in this budget proposal? The House wasn’t as apt to go along with that as the Senate was, and now it appears by a very slim margin that there’s been some consensus now for this process to move forward. 

[FERRECHIO] Right. So to understand what this bill is, it’s actually a measure, And it sets a rule that will allow the House and Senate to pass a big tax bill without any Democrats. Normally, if you’re passing something in the Senate, you have to get past the filibuster and you need Democrats. But this special budget resolution changes those rules and it will allow them to pass a tax cut bill without any Democrats.

In other words, with a simple majority, which the Republicans now control in the Senate. So it’s a little weedy, but it’s a two-part process, but you needed to pass the first process, and that outlines the spending issues. And there wasn’t a lot of agreement among Republicans about spending. There’s a big faction of Republicans who want really deep cuts, because the deficit and debt are huge. They want to rein in the spending. They didn’t fully get their way on that. So they initially revolted, and they blocked the thing this week, and it stalled on the House floor. 

But there were some wrangling behind the scenes. And earlier this week, we heard from President Trump, who warned that these members should really stop their grandstanding. Meanwhile, they’re all staring in the face of the stock market turmoil. There’s a big feeling right now that as this tariff whiplash is going on, if they pass the big tax bill, that that will sort of goose the stock market again to start recovering and get the economy going with that big message that taxes are going to be cut. 

So today, I think we saw that play out and Republicans all finally came together and they passed step one, which is this big budget plan. 

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