CNN
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House Speaker Mike Johnson informed Republicans at a closed-door meeting Saturday that Donald Trump favored moving his agenda as one sweeping package, according to sources in attendance — a key announcement fraught with risk but one that sets the stage for advancing the president-elect’s ambitious plans.
The effort to include border, energy and tax policy in a single bill is a shift from where Senate Republican leader John Thune has been, but it also represents an evolution in how Trump’s team has begun to see the legislative landscape over the last several weeks. A source familiar with this change told CNN it had become clear with the spending bill debacle and a narrow speaker’s race that there will be very little room to maneuver two separate bills.
Several key Republicans in the House, including Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, had spent months pushing for a single bill, arguing that two bills would become too unruly in the House, where the GOP has an extremely narrow majority.
“It shows the best and quickest approach to deliver for President Trump is one beautiful, big package,” Smith told CNN last month.
The shift in strategy had helped Johnson with some holdouts ahead of the speaker’s race. GOP Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia told CNN on Friday that Johnson and the Trump team’s promise to push one single bill helped get him to vote in favor of the speaker.
Republican Rep. Keith Self of Texas, who flipped his vote and backed Johnson at the last minute, also told CNN on Friday that he looked forward to doing one “big, beautiful” bill now that the race for speaker was over.
A massive bill will take far more time to negotiate and will represent a huge challenge for a party that has so little room for error. A bill of this magnitude will need to go through several committees of jurisdiction and is likely to take far longer than a more constrained border bill would. When Thune laid out his vision after clinching his role as majority leader in November, he’d set an ambitious 100-day sprint to pass a narrow border bill. A tax overhaul plus border package likely won’t be done that quickly.