Wedding bells for Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick
'There may be a longer list of things that were kicked out by the Senate parliamentarian as non-compliant with the Byrd rule — I think we should make another run at that and look for ways to structure the provisions so that it's more fundamentally budgetary in impact and policy,' the Texas Republican said during the press call Tuesday afternoon. 'I suspect that's why they were kicked out.'
The so-called Byrd rule limits what provisions can be included in a bill moving through Congress through the reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to skirt the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Arrington specifically pointed to one provision stripped in the Senate from the House-passed megabill that would have prohibited Medicaid coverage for gender affirming surgeries, and another that would have banned noncitizens from tapping into Medicaid resources.
'I think those — we need to spend more time' crafting the provisions to pass muster with the parliamentarian, Arrington said. 'I don't think we spent enough time to look for a pathway to success on them, and that's sort of the landscape, as I see it, of the opportunities in another reconciliation bill.'
Echoing Speaker Mike Johnson 's recent comments, Arrington said he suspects GOP leaders will attempt to do two more party-line packages in the 119th Congress, with the next one slated for the fall.
Arrington added members would likely demand that those additional measures be drafted under circumstances where both chambers adhere to the same budget framework, avoiding a repeat of the most recent scenario where House and Senate Republicans each gave their committees different deficit reduction targets.
He lamented the fact that the Senate did not comply with the House's aggressive instructions for writing iits version of the megabill, but credited fiscal hawks for helping secure $1.5 trillion in savings in a final product, and noted that it was not 'feasible' to expect the full magnitude of cost savings would be acheived in a single reconciliation bill — 'politically, at least.'
As it currently stands, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law over the weekend, is 'front loaded with costs and back-end loaded with savings,' which Arrington said should compel Republicans to make sure the administration follows through in 'mak[ing] sure the savings actually happen.'
'That was a concern among conservative budget hawks,' Arrington said. 'When I think about the Budget Committee's role going forward, one of the things that we need to do … is keep the pressure on the Senate, on the House and the administration to be diligent in implementation and enforcement.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
12 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Mississippi becomes fourth state to send National Guard troops to D.C.
WASHINGTON — Joining forces from three other Republican-led states, the Mississippi National Guard will deploy 200 troops to Washington as part of the Trump administration's ongoing federal policing and immigration overhaul in the nation's capital. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a statement Monday that he has approved the deployment of approximately 200 Mississippi National Guard Soldiers to Washington, D.C. 'Crime is out of control there, and it's clear something must be done to combat it,' Reeves said. Mississippi joins three other states that have pledged to deploy hundreds of National Guard members to the nation's capital to bolster the Republican administration's operation to overhaul policing in the Democratic-led city through a federal crackdown on crime and homelessness. West Virginia said it was deploying 300 to 400 troops, South Carolina pledged 200 and Ohio said it will send 150 in the coming days, deployments that built on top of President Trump's initial order that 800 National Guard troops deploy as part of the federal intervention. Trump's executive order that launched the federal operation declared a 'crime emergency' in the District of Columbia and initiated a takeover Washington's police department. The administration has ordered local police to cooperate with federal agents on immigration enforcement, orders that would contradict local laws prohibiting such collaboration. 'D.C. has been under siege from thugs and killers, but now, D.C. is back under Federal Control where it belongs,' Trump wrote on his social media website a day after issuing his order. 'The White House is in charge. The Military and our Great Police will liberate this City, scrape away the filth, and make it safe, clean, habitable and beautiful once more!' National Guard members in the District of Columbia have been assisting law enforcement with tasks including crowd control and patrolling landmarks such as the National Mall and Union Station. Their role has been limited thus far, and it remains unclear why additional troops would be needed. Over the weekend in Washington, protesters pushed back on federal law enforcement and National Guard troops fanning out in the city. Scores of protesters gathered in the city's Dupont Circle on Saturday and marched to the White House. Brown and Pesoli write for the Associated Press.
Boston Globe
12 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Jules Witcover, political columnist who relished the horse race, dies at 98
Advertisement Mr. Witcover went to the nation's capital in 1954 for the Newhouse publishing chain, which owned the Star-Ledger. Rising to become its indefatigable chief political writer, he witnessed some of the defining moments of the era. He covered the 1960 presidential nomination of Senator John F. Kennedy. The next year, he stood at the Berlin Wall soon after it went up to divide the German capital for almost 30 years. He interviewed civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as well as the segregationist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He was feet away from Robert F. Kennedy when the New York senator was mortally wounded at a Los Angeles hotel while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Witcover said that the sound of the shots rang in his ears long afterward, and that the sight of the senator bleeding on the floor just after winning the California primary would haunt him for decades. Advertisement Mr. Witcover helped power a highly competitive Los Angeles Times bureau in Washington from 1969 to 1973, serving as political reporter and assistant news editor during the first Nixon administration. He spent the next three years at The Washington Post as a specialist in executive branch politics before being recruited to the rival Washington Star to start a five-day-a-week column with Germond called 'Politics Today.' The Baltimore Sun picked up the column after the Star folded in 1981. (Mr. Witcover was unceremoniously dropped in 2005, five years after Germond retired.) The reporting and analysis of 'Politics Today' ran in 140 newspapers and made the Witcover-Germond partnership a major brand in political journalism. Their specialty was chronicling the backroom decision-making of the political elite, from the candidates to the party functionaries, and how the rest of the media chased the story. Embracing sports metaphors, they likened politics to a game with stars who could triumph or fall in ignominious defeat. They also wrote for publications including National Journal and generated a series of well-received books about presidential campaigns, among them 'Blue Smoke and Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980.' Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, reporter Curtis J. Sitomer called the 1981 volume 'a delightful repast of amusing and often telling anecdotes, as it prances us down the Republican and Democratic primary paths and finally on to the broader general election trail.' Advertisement Other Witcover-Germond titles included 'Wake Us When It's Over: Presidential Politics of 1984,' 'Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988' and 'Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992.' Mr. Witcover's reputation was that of a 'shoe leather' reporter who preferred to gather facts on the hustings instead of on the phone. He and Germond also hosted informal dinners with leading politicians, deep-background events where no one could be quoted by name but that gave the two journalists invaluable access to figures such as future president Ronald Reagan. Mr. Witcover never attained the celebrity of the pugnacious Germond, who relished the spotlight and became an omnipresent TV pundit on 'Today,' 'Meet the Press,' and 'The McLaughlin Group.' Instead, he spent his extracurricular time writing books of history, on subjects as varied as the selection of vice presidents from John Adams to Dan Quayle and German sabotage missions in the United States during World War I. His 1997 book 'The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America' explored a momentous year in Mr. Witcover's career, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King, protests and rioting over the Vietnam War, and the election of Nixon as president. Mr. Witcover 'is old-fashioned in the sense of being possessed of an empirical eye,' former journalist and Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal wrote in a New York Times review. 'He clearly enjoys politics, tries to understand the particular motivations of politicians and observes events to see how it all plays out. His approach is the opposite of using people and circumstances as grist for the turn of phrase, whose object is not really to describe the man in the arena but to polish the image of the spectator.' Advertisement Jules Joseph Witcover was born in Union City, N.J., on July 16, 1927. His father ran a one-man auto-body shop. His mother was a homemaker who raised Jules and his older sister in her Catholic faith. His father was Jewish but was nonpracticing. In high school, Mr. Witcover helped out in his father's shop. He had not initially planned to go to college, but a teammate on his high school basketball team - the class valedictorian - suggested he take a look at Columbia University. Mr. Witcover, who reportedly did not know that Columbia was a highly competitive Ivy League school, applied and was accepted after scoring well on an admissions test. After a year in the Navy, Mr. Witcover returned to Columbia on the G.I. Bill and graduated in 1949. Mr. Witcover began his journalism career at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. His nearly 40-year marriage to Marian Laverty ended in divorce in 1991. In 1997, he married Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, an author and biographer of the iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken. Mr. Witcover had three children from his first marriage, Paul, Amy and Julie; and a son, Peter Young, from a relationship with Amy Young. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. After Germond retired, Mr. Witcover used their column to express increasingly caustic and opinionated views of political leaders. He slammed George W. Bush as the 'worst and most dangerous president in my lifetime' and the Iraq War as 'unnecessary and calamitous.' The Sun - then part of the Tribune Co. - published the column with less frequency and slashed Mr. Witcover's salary at a time of drastic staff cutbacks and declining circulation. Mr. Witcover was subsequently syndicated by the Tribune Content Agency. Advertisement Mr. Witcover was still working at age 92, publishing an update of his 2010 biography 'Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption' with material on the 2020 presidential campaign. In reviewing Mr. Witcover's 2005 memoirs, 'The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch,' an admiring Sun colleague characterized Mr. Witcover as 'a species that seems more and more endangered' in the digital age of news reporting. The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein, another admirer, later called him 'the last of the mastodons.' Mr. Witcover seemed aware of his reputation as a throwback and began his book with a self-deprecating observation: 'Unless you're an old political junkie who knows the difference between H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, you've probably never heard of me.'
Axios
12 minutes ago
- Axios
How your county is affected by "big beautiful bill" tax cuts
Americans dodged a big tax hike when Congress passed the "big, beautiful bill," making permanent the tax cuts of President Trump 's first term — and adding on a bunch more. Why it matters: Tax cuts free up money for folks to spend on other things — which could be dearly needed next year as wages still haven't caught up with inflation and tariffs threaten to push costs up further. The big picture: The average American will receive a federal tax cut of $3,752 in 2026 thanks to the bill, per an analysis from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group that mostly supports lower taxes. The intrigue: They may not feel much of a change. The map above compares the tax rate in 2026 with what it would've been had the big bill not passed and the 2017 tax cuts expired. By the numbers: The largest average tax cuts will be in Wyoming ($5,375), Washington ($5,372) and Massachusetts ($5,139). Taxpayers in West Virginia ($2,503) and Mississippi ($2,401) will see the smallest average cuts. How it works: The big bill not only made the 2017 tax cuts permanent, it added on new breaks: deductions for tips and overtime income, a cut for seniors and an expanded child-care tax cut. These are temporary provisions. Zoom in: Business owners will get some of the biggest cuts — thanks, in part, to tax breaks being made permanent for research and development expenses and other provisions. Those in high-tax coastal regions will also get big breaks, thanks to the increased cap on state and local tax deductions (known as SALT — also temporary). For example, the average tax cut in 2026 for Westchester County, N.Y. — a high-income New York City suburb poised for a big SALT payoff — is $6,644. But just to the south, in the Bronx, the average tax cut is $1,761. The largest average tax cuts are happening in mountain resort towns where high-earners and business owners live. In Teton County, Wy., residents will see an average tax cut of $37,373, the highest in the U.S. The smallest tax cuts are in rural counties — like Loup County, in Nebraska, where the average tax cut in 2026 is $824.
