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Republican lawmakers are ready to hit the ground running to push forward President Donald Trump’s agenda immediately after his inauguration.
Some want to push through a large MAGA-themed bill to kick of the 119th Congress, which would include nearly everything but the kitchen sink.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc., told Just The News, “We don’t have a lot of wiggle room. That’s why we have to get everybody on board with everything.”
He emphasized that Republicans held a slim majority in both chambers, but the slimmest in the House. He told the outlet, “So we’ve got to get everything that we need to make America great again in that first big bill that is going to be passed in, presumably, February or March.”
President Trump’s team and members of Congress have already begun negotiating how they will tackle key legislative priorities, especially a bundled immigration and border security package and a separate bill to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
Key Republican committee-members have called for a single bill to ensure that immigration reform is included, given that Congress has failed to take meaningful action for decades to improve legal immigration.
Grothman made clear that a lax approach to deportation could not stand and that President Trump would need to stand strong against the “weak-kneed open borders Republicans” who only want to deport criminal illegal migrants. He told the outlet, “No, no, no. We have to remove a clear majority of the people who snuck in here during the four years.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said that he believes the Trump tax extension needs to be taken up in a second reconciliation bill, but border efforts need to be addressed first.
Senior Trump advisor Jason Miller argued that the tax cuts were “the big thing,” in addition to other campaign promises like, “no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime pay for people who make their products here in the U.S.”
Miller also said that cutting the corporate tax rate from 21 to 15 was also a top priority. He said that Trump and congressional lawmakers were “working through” the differing proposed approaches.
