The House this week passed a budget resolution, following the Senate’s passage late last week, setting up the next step in accomplishing President Trump’s tax, border, and energy agenda.
House and Senate leadership have worked for weeks to reconcile differences between their budget resolutions, which each chamber has passed. The budget resolution agreed upon this week would provide an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, enact spending cuts, raise the debt ceiling, and address various energy and border policies.
Budget resolutions are instructions to each Congressional committee outlining what must be included in the final reconciliation bill.
While both the House and Senate already passed their own budget resolutions last month, the one the House passed this week is the product of the negotiations between the chambers that have taken place over the last few weeks.
A few steps remain in the budget reconciliation process. The House and Senate now must craft the final bill based on the budget resolution’s instructions. Once that is finalized, both chambers must vote on the negotiated bill.
The budget reconciliation process has strict rules that anything included in the bill must have a primary impact on spending and not just any policy provision can be included.
The process allows for passage of a bill along a simple majority, meaning Republicans could pass the final bill with a simple majority in the House and just 50 votes in the Senate.
