'Much bigger lift': Trump bets on 'huge slate of lawyers' to overcome GOP’s 'nothing-margin of control'

08 December 2024

Donald Trump’s incoming administration has “a huge slate of lawyers that has been working since basically Trump lost office” to help push through the president-elect’s agenda — despite an incredibly narrow margin of control for Republicans in Congress, a CNN reporter round table explained Sunday.

The reporters were discussing a CNN story published Sunday that detailed the “legislative landmines” facing “the GOP’s ambitious agenda [—] despite controlling all of Washington.”

CNN reports Senate Republicans — including Senate majority leader Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — hope to push through legislation on "border security and energy production,” while a vocal faction of House Republicans want to see immediate action on a tax bill.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told CNN’s Manu Raju Republican leadership is focused on the “sequencing” of Trump’s legislative agenda.

“[Republicans] all have the same priorities and it's just a question of the sequence, of how we do it?” Johnson said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “So I’m not going to pre-guess how that comes out. But we're having fruitful discussion about it.”

Discussing this reporting on Sunday, New York Times congressional reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis said Republicans in Congress and on Trump’s transition team “really want to strike while the iron is hot, but it is the case if you look at history that when one party has control, there’s a lot of celebration and a feeling of elation … but you find out very quickly that it's difficult to do because you do have internal party divisions.”

“There is a ‘nothing’-margin of control,” Hirschfeld Davis added, noting such a slim majority has proven an issue for Johnson and former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) before him.

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“They do need to kind of get on the same page pretty quickly on how they're going to do this, because procedurally, you really need to make some decisions in January to be able to sequence this in a way that will work,” Hirschfeld Davis said.

“There’s a process to avoid a Senate filibuster, which means that they can pass things along party lines,” Raju explained. “But they really can't do that more than — some think they can do it a couple of times, it really can usually be successfully attempted just once.”

“We saw Democrats struggle with this as well in the first two years of President Biden's term,” Hirschfeld Davis noted. “They had the ability to use reconciliation to get around the filibuster but they couldn't agree on what should be in that package, which to do first, which to put the most priority on.”

Hirschfeld Davis argued Republicans are dealing with, "in some ways, a much bigger lift, because the scope of this agenda … is quite large.”

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Axios political reporter Hans Nichols then explained why “the sequencing matters,” noting “you have a limited amount of political capital” to expend on priorities.

“Internally and privately, they all know that they've got to get this right,” Nichols said. “I don't think they've quite, in the House Republican Conference, come to terms — nor has the Trump transition — that the majorities are that thin. And if Trump says jump, the answer is not going to be ‘how high?’ it's going to be ‘here's what I want.”

“A thousand mansions are going to bloom in the House of Representatives,” Nichols continued. “… There are going to be some people that are going to have their own priorities, whether or not it's SALT (State and Local Tax), whether or not some pet project, they're going to demand it before they vote for what the president wants. And they're going to get it because, again, it's just so tight.”

CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes countered that the Trump transition is “much more prepared for what a narrow majority actually looks like.”

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“That's why you have a huge slate of lawyers that has been working since basically Trump lost office to come up with ideas to circumvent Congress, even if [Trump] was to have the majority,” Holmes said.

“They have been trying to draft these executive orders to push through the things that he wants first, and come up with legal — or at least trying to come up with legal — ways to do so because they understand how small the majority is and because Donald Trump, this time around, actually has a better understanding of what this means," the reporter added.

“Remember [Trump] came into the similar scenario back in 2016, 2017 where [Republicans] had control of the House, Senate and the White House," Holmes continued. “… But I will argue against the one part of that, which was, the Senate [in 2017] didn't really like him. There was still a number of Republicans in the Senate who were like, ‘Who is this guy? And why do we have to support him?’ You are looking at a very different Senate here. This is a Senate of people that he has backed, that understand and have gotten behind him.”

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