Trump and Republicans plot radical policy agenda in one ‘big, beautiful bill’
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House speaker says party seeks single piece of legislation covering tax cuts, immigration and military spending. Donald Trump is working with top Republicans in Congress to devise a single “big, beautiful bill” that will contain all of his major policy ambitions – including a clampdown on immigration, tax cuts, and increased military spending in an attempt to supercharge his radical agenda as he embarks on a second presidency.
The plan to pile all of Trump’s main policy goals into one mega-bill, against the wishes of some top congressional Republicans, raises the prospect of months of potentially bruising political in-fighting needed to secure its passage. Though the Republicans hold both chambers of Congress, their margin in the House is the slimmest in almost a century.
“I’ll be dealing with the smallest margin in US history for much of the first 100 days,” Mike Johnson, the House speaker, told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, referring to the 119th Congress, which opened on 3 January. The perilous nature of that margin was on full display last Friday when Johnson secured his own re-election as speaker by only one vote.
Johnson confirmed to Fox News that the idea of cramming everything into a single bill was prevailing. The alternative proposal is for two separate bills – and is favored by the new Republican majority leader in the US senate, John Thune, and his fellow senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“At the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big, beautiful bill,” Johnson said. “We can put together one big up-and-down vote that can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it.”.
