President Donald Trump spent his first full day in the White House attempting to diffuse a weekslong dispute over how to pass his agenda through Congress, hosting Republican leaders in two separate meetings in the Oval Office.
Trump met privately with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), on Tuesday afternoon, followed by a separate huddle with their entire leadership teams.
The meetings were billed as a strategy session, with the two chambers at odds over whether to sweep Trump’s entire agenda into “one big, beautiful bill,” as he prefers, or break it into two parts.
In the latter scenario, Congress would consider border and defense legislation first and then renew Trump’s 2017 tax cuts later in the year.
Republicans arrived at the White House hopeful that they could come closer to resolving the dispute. The Senate prefers the second approach, given the complexity of negotiating tax reform, but House tax writers fear their legislation cannot pass without the border as a deal sweetener.
“We’ve been talking about it — hopefully, we’ll make a breakthrough,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the No. 4 Senate Republican, told the Washington Examiner ahead of the meeting.
Lawmakers are also looking for greater clarity on the executive orders Trump will be signing in the coming days. His first centered largely on illegal immigration and domestic energy production.
“I think it’s really just keeping the communication lines open with all of us there, so we know where we all are,” Capito said of the White House visit.
Republicans will need virtual unanimity to get Trump’s priorities through Congress. In the House, Johnson has a two-seat majority, while the Senate is subject to strict rules that limit what the GOP can pass without running into the 60-vote filibuster.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate.
Trump met repeatedly with congressional Republicans in the weeks before he was inaugurated, including a Sunday breakfast with the Senate GOP. The meetings failed to resolve the cross-chamber standoff, however.
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Senate Republicans have for now settled on crafting a “contingency plan” that can pass in the coming weeks if the House struggles to enact tax reform.
Johnson, for his part, has laid out an aggressive schedule to pass Trump’s agenda by Easter, with a final bill on the president’s desk by Memorial Day.
