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If former President Donald Trump returns to the White House and the GOP regains control of the Senate and retains control of the House, the Republican congressional leadership will have the opportunity to use the “reconciliation process” to enact urgently needed legislation.
“There’s not a moment to lose!” was a saying of the Royal Navy in the “age of sail,” one familiar to anyone who has read Patrick O’Brian’s splendid 20 volume Aubrey-Maturin series set at sea in the Napoleonic Wars (and in the single screen adaptation of the novels in “Master and Commander,” where Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey utters the familiar admonition to take every advantage of every day, hour and minute.)
The need in D.C. is indeed for speed. In the post-war era, Republicans have always meandered their way through their rare opportunities to legislate when all three lawmaking bodies are headed by Republicans. Always they have employed the standard Beltway calendar and four-day work weeks. They are never ready to move quickly, and rarely by April if that. Their majorities and the president who brought them along with his campaign have never landed in Washington, D.C., with anything like a big agenda and the urgency that is required to move big legislative packages.
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Conservatives are by nature a careful lot, often cautious in the extreme. Given where we are in 2024, that deeply embedded caution has to go by the boards and everyone from Trump down to the “biggest reach” candidate in a Senate campaign — probably the campaign of Nella Domenici against incumbent Democrat Senator Martin Heinrich in New Mexico — has to pledge to go far, go fast and go together.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump would need help from congressional Republicans to hit the ground running the day he takes office. (Getty Images)
The country needs this dynamic urgency to repair the massive damage done to the economy during the Biden-Harris years and to assure the superpower status of the U.S. Indeed, the urgent need to stop our “national bleeding” in every phase of our federal government has to dominate the GOP’s collective fall campaign. Much needs to be done, and every GOP candidate should be insistent on its immediate doing when sworn in.
“Reconciliation” is celebrating its 50th anniversary, having been established by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. This process allows for expedited consideration of certain tax, spending and debt limit legislation. In the Senate, reconciliation bills aren’t subject to filibuster, which means the GOP would have real advantages for enacting controversial budget and tax measures.
The key is that every provision of bills passed pursuant to reconciliation must have a genuine nexus with the spending plans adopted by Congress as part of an overall budget. Thus, if the overall budget agreed to by the House Republicans and Senate Republicans is silent on a subject — neither spending money on a goal nor cutting past expenditures made on that subject — the reconciliation process cannot be used, and the Senate’s filibuster will prevent serious reforms of outdated laws and ruinous spending.
“Reconciliation” is the process that allowed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to spend trillions of dollars on pork on the unnecessary and hugely expensive “COVID relief” package in 2021 and the absurdly named “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022, which spent more trillions and made inflation worse.
If the reconciliation window opens in 2025, I hope President Trump would use it to:
(1) Mandate a massive defense re-armament on an expedited basis, one constructed along the lines of the program put forward by Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker earlier this year, and one that specifically mandates the construction or refurbishing of shipyards without regard to any other law that would slow that process down. In short, we need an immediate and enormous crash defense build-up, one that gets the Columbia class nuclear submarine into the water in time to replace our aging Ohio class “boomers,” and one which substantially expands our and our allies’ attack submarine forces and which expands our cyber and satellite capabilities as we reorient our military toward the vast threat posed by Communist China;
(2) Extend the Trump Tax Cuts plus the exemption of tips from taxable income and the taxation of endowments greater than a billion dollars;
(3) Authorize the rapid expansion of energy production from every source, suspending the cumbersome regulatory hurdles used by the administrative state to cripple production and export of energy and the construction of modern nuclear plants which have to drive our AI revolution;
As Usha Chilukuri Vance, Ivanka Trump, and former first lady Melania Trump watch, Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, sign paperwork to officially accept the nominations during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(4) Mandate massive reductions in force across the hundreds of federal agencies and commissions and from the nearly 3 million federal bureaucrats via both the direct order to cut every federal bureaucracy not specifically exempted (the Border Patrol for example) by at least a third of its civilian workforce, and the repeal of those portions of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that make it effectively impossible to discipline the administrative state;
(5) Mandate and “authorize for immediate construction notwithstanding any other law or treaty with any nation” of up to 1,200 miles of border wall;
(6) Condition the flow of federal dollars to K-12 education on the existence in every state that wants those federal dollars of a robust “school choice” program modeled on either the existing programs in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Ohio or West Virginia. This exercise of the Constitution’s spending power is a tried-and-true means of creating incentives for the states to innovate;
(7) Prohibit the award of any grant or other form of federal subsidy to any college or university with an endowment in excess of a billion dollars. The idea what the taxpayer is funding institutions like Harvard with its nearly $50-billion-dollar endowment and deep ideological disfigurement is absurd. (The authority to suspend all federal funding on colleges or universities with documented histories of antisemitic environments should be a part of this new approach.)
(8) Zero out funding for National Public Radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and all other grant-making by all other agencies for a period of four years or until a balanced budget is achieved.
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(9) Condition federal spending on maintenance of state election systems on the adaptation of a uniform set of election procedures including the use of voter ID and the limiting of absentee voting to carefully vetted ballots obtained via carefully regulated procedures. Every state should be able to report its returns on election night or within a week of a recount if mandated, or forfeit federal funding.
The standard “California model” that sees routine delay of weeks for counting ballots for at least federal offices — a certain and recurring embarrassment to the Golden State — should not be tolerated or at a minimum not subsidized. No other country in the West permits California-like haphazardness in the rendering of the people’s decision, and the spending power and control over federal election law should be used to end the elections chaos in California and similarly “progressive states.” The prohibition of “ranked voting” for federal office ought also to be passed into law. “Ranked voting” is a sham upon the electorate worked by progressives upon an unsuspecting citizenry and an invitation to even more election chaos.
“Reconciliation” is the process that allowed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to spend trillions of dollars on pork on the unnecessary and hugely expensive “COVID relief” package in 2021 and the absurdly named “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022, which spent more trillions and made inflation worse.
That’s a collective “big swing” of various measures that would reset the federal government, but all these measures (and more) should easily fit into the confines of the reconciliation process. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris used the process to vastly deepen our national debt, pour out previously unimaginable levels of pork, and unleash the ruinous inflation that has defined their tenure in office.
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When Donald Trump was new to the government business in 2017, he, his senior advisors and the congressional Republicans failed to make effective use of reconciliation in his first year in office, instead chasing after and failing to gain the repeal of the now embedded Obamacare. In his new term, Trump won’t go along with other than his own agenda. Making his own priorities clear will allow the Republican Congressional leadership to fashion the legislative language needed to get the big changes accomplished within Trump’s second “100 days.”
“Transitions” are typically wasted on the game of who gets named to what job. Again, Trump learned hard lessons in the 2016-2017 transition, and will as a result come prepared with his list of his nominees and the new GOP Senate should expedite their confirmations, using round-the-clock and weekend sessions if defeated Democrats begin their slow walking immediately. But Trump also needs to light a fire under his GOP allies on the Hill. There is genuinely not a moment to lose.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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