House GOP Leadership Press Tax Writers for Quick Bill Markup

House Republicans are looking to wrap up negotiations on their signature tax legislation in the coming days in hopes of achieving their high-stakes political and fiscal deadlines.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) expect the House Ways and Means Committee will join the rest of policy committees to mark up its portion of the budget reconciliation by the end of next week, they told reporters Tuesday.

Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and other tax writers have been less sanguine about a timeline, citing divisions remaining on several big topics.

Still, the comments by Johnson and Scalise underscore the urgency of House Republicans seeking to lock in tax policy to meet their self-imposed Memorial Day deadline. The bill would extend expiring parts of the 2017 GOP tax law, along with a slew of other Trump administration priorities.

“They’ve come to a consensus,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday, referring to the tax writers.

Top Republican negotiators aim to send the tax bill to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) tempered expectations on Monday, calling the date aspirational, citing procedural hurdles.

The holiday’s symbolic deadline may also come around the same time that Congress will have to extend the government’s borrowing limit or else force a historic default on the national debt.

Republicans’ budget blueprint allowed lawmakers to increase the debt limit by as much as $5 trillion to take the issue off the table until after the midterm elections.

“That’s probably going to indicate some kind of pressure to get it done before” the 2017 law’s partial expiration at the end of the year, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said Tuesday.

It remains to be seen whether House Republicans will come to the near-unanimity necessary in the next week or so to meet leadership’s deadline, and anything the House passes will need the Senate’s approval as well.

“I can’t tell you whether we will end up exactly on the same page or not” between the two tax panels’ bills, Crapo said.

Divisions on SALT, IRA

Several big topics remain unresolved, Ways and Means member Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) said.

Republicans from high-tax states will huddle with leadership Wednesday afternoon in their bid to increase the statutory cap on the state-and-local tax deduction, and lawmakers remain divided on the fate of clean-energy tax credits from Democrats’ 2022 tax-and-climate law.

“We’re looking at everything,” Steube said Tuesday. He added, though, that “we probably have more things as a committee we need to work through next week.”

Tax writers are also looking for certainty from other panels tasked with meeting spending cut targets necessary to provide the necessary offsets to the tax portion of the package. The Energy and Commerce Committee, which bears the brunt of that responsibility, is scheduled to mark up its bill on May 7.

“I don’t know about next week but we’re on track to get the bill done by Memorial Day,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) said Tuesday. “We need to see where the other committees are and what number we mark to.”

The vast majority of Republicans’ tax bill will be an extension of the 2017 tax law, so the most substantial portion of the legislation’s impact will nevertheless mean taxpayers won’t see a year-over-year change to their returns by its enactment.

And that fact isn’t lost on Democrats who call the Republicans’ gambit counter to their goals of lowering prices and improving the economy.

“They have to figure out how they are going to justify that to the American public,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said Tuesday, including “how they’re going to pay for some of it on the backs of the American public, to benefit—at the end of the day with this tax cut—the very wealthy in this country.”