Republicans spent the end of 2024 hyping their plans for two major party-line bills. Now it’s time for them to make it all happen.
House GOP lawmakers are meeting Saturday for an all-day workshop to fine-tune their legislative ambitions on energy, immigration, defense and taxes for the beginning of the year.
They will have to overcome persistent divisions about policy and strategy, and tight margins. A protracted election for speaker may also get in the way.
“We’re going to be moving the first week that we have the majority — so we are ready to go,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said recently at an American Petroleum Institute event.
Scalise said “opening up more energy production” and “permitting reform” were key priorities. “We’re looking at all those things.”
Conversations with lawmakers, aides and lobbyists reveal Republicans want to use the budget reconciliation process — which will allow them to bypass the Senate filibuster — to expand drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, repeal a fee on methane emissions, claw back electric vehicle subsidies and potentially scrap EPA tailpipe rules meant to promote EV adoption.
Some Republican lawmakers have expressed concern about repealing green tax credits. They may also express alarm about expanded offshore drilling.
Reconciliation allows the House and Senate to pass legislation with simple majorities, if there’s a clear budget nexus. That limits what Republicans will be able to achieve, Scalise noted.
He suggested the GOP conference could face a learning curve: Most House Republicans weren’t in Congress the last time they drew up a reconciliation package during the first Trump administration.
“The biggest concern we have right now is 60 percent of our January majority was not here in 2017, when we did this last time,” he said. “They don’t know what the reconciliation process is, most importantly the limitations of reconciliation.”
The plan for now is for two reconciliation bills, with the second focused on taxes. But some influential Republicans, like Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), insist the approach could imperil the party’s reconciliation plans because of the House GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“Everyone can have their ideas on it,” he said. “There are pros and cons to each approach.”
Getting ‘kosher with the parliamentarian’
Democrats passed two reconciliation bills during the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term — one focused on the pandemic and the second on climate change and health.
Eight years ago, the last time Republicans passed a reconciliation package, they managed to open oil and gas drilling in the Arctic’s coastal plain, but the Senate parliamentarian blocked them on revenue sharing between Alaska and its tribes. They also had to do without language on environmental reviews.
Still, Republicans are eyeing changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, something they failed to get done during bipartisan talks last month.
Some Republicans like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have been bullish on the prospects. Others, like incoming Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), have tempered expectations for a broader permitting overhaul.
“I am concerned the expectations of what we can do in reconciliation are not gonna match what we can actually do in terms of policy,” she recently told POLITICO.
Still, Republicans like Scalise have said Democrats expanded the bounds of what counts under reconciliation when they passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
Democrats had multiple House and Senate committees feed their ideas into the effort. Originally, the party planned deep legislative overhauls, including a clean energy standard and changes to hardrock mine oversight.
Even though the IRA was a much less ambitious compromise, Republican critics say it created new programs and policies, such as EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), noting Democrats had 12 committees involved in drafting the IRA, thought Republicans should take a lesson.
“We’re studying what they did to get things kosher with the parliamentarian,” Westerman said.
Democrats, greens prepare to fight
Perhaps the biggest reconciliation question is how much of the IRA — worth hundreds of billions of dollars in credits for solar, wind, hydropower, carbon capture and other clean technologies — will Republicans try to repeal to pay for extending tax cuts.
Nick Loris, executive vice president of policy at the conservative group C3 Solutions, said credits with the highest Congressional Budget Office score go to projects that would likely have been built without government subsidies.
“That largely amounts to taxpayers footing the bill without any meaningful decarbonization,” he said.
Republican lobbyist Mike McKenna thought the carbon capture and sequestration tax credit would survive, although in a modified form. The same could be true for the hydrogen tax credit.
He also predicted reconciliation could include legislation precluding any IRA and infrastructure law benefits from reaching entities with ties to China.
Democrats are preparing to play defense. “We have to keep it simple,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “They are not procedural. They are going to transfer money from working-class people to international corporations — that is their primary goal, and the rest is details.”
Outgoing Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been instructing advocates to target Republican members by emphasizing specific projects in their districts.
One environmental organization, the Climate Action Campaign, is sending a welcome packet to new members of Congress urging them to “stand strong” and united in defense of climate progress “in the face of anticipated legislative, executive and anti-regulatory attacks.”
It urged members to defend the IRA programs; reject agency cuts; defend energy efficiency standards; and protect environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and NEPA.
“Amplify the benefits that federal climate programs and initiatives are bringing to communities in your state or district, such as cleaner air, good-paying clean energy jobs, lower energy bills for consumers, and more,” the group wrote.
One Republican suspected the Democratic strategy would pay off. “When you start taking people’s oxes, it’s amazing how many ox owners stand up and defend them,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), referring to the subsidies.
“I think we can get rid of some of the electric vehicle nonsense,” he said, but then suggested securing Project Tundra, a carbon capture venture in his home state.
Reporter Heather Richards contributed.
