Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) to discuss House Republicans moving forward on the budget resolution in order to unleash President Trump’s agenda to cut spending and unleash American growth. Leader Scalise stressed the importance of moving forward with the reconciliation process to ensure tax cut permanency so families and businesses have the certainty they need to plan for the future.
 
On Republicans and President Trump rallying around one agenda:

“This is a really important week, not just in the House, but for the ability for Congress to join with President Trump and deliver on that agenda that we all ran on. We all know what President Trump said at his rallies, talking about getting America back on track, securing the border, locking in tax rates, no tax on tips, producing more energy in America, getting rules and regulations under control. All of those things are in this one big, beautiful that we have been focused on for more than a year in the House. But President Trump is not the only one that ran on all of those objectives. We did, too. House Republicans ran on those same things. We need to follow through now and get the job done. Nobody said it would be easy. Wasn't easy to get the budget passed a few weeks ago. Some, in fact, not necessarily saying anybody in this room, but some said the bill might not pass. And yet we passed the bill without a vote to spare because we know our margins are narrow. But our commitment is firm on getting this done because, as the Whip said, failure is not an option.”

On House Republicans moving forward on budget resolution without delay:

“So today is no different where we are than where we were the same week that we passed the budget over a month ago. There are members that have questions – that's not a surprise. On any big bill we've dealt with, going back to 2017, when we did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there were members who had questions, and our job is to continue answering those questions while moving the ball forward. But it's critical that we advance this agenda, that we don't delay, because passing the budget doesn't end the process. It starts the reconciliation process. We can't even begin reconciliation until the budget is done. If some people think we could just wait for the Senate to catch up to the House, we could talk all day about the fact that they're not against what we're trying to do. They just haven't gotten to that point. The months of meetings and negotiations that we've had in the House, the back and forth with CBO that we have done, which, by the way, has yielded some really big improvements in the CBO scoring. Some of it is just coming in from the initial scoring from the CBO because we disagreed with their numbers, but we didn't just yell and scream. We went back to them, and we're now getting CBO to give us better numbers on the savings that we'll achieve from things like work requirements and some of the other reforms that we all agree upon. But we cannot delay.”

On the need for Congress to stabilize the tax code and advance Trump's agenda:

“The country can't afford for us to delay a month or longer to wait on the Senate getting where we are. We've got to continue to move forward. The bill that we have before us allows us to do that. It allows us to achieve all the savings that we laid out in the House bill. It allows us to achieve all the border security we laid out. It allows us to achieve all the things we want to do to stabilize the tax code. But think about this, because people are watching the markets, and that's understandable. There is trillions of dollars on the sidelines, and I've heard this from so many people in different industries all across the country, trillions of dollars that are not looking at tariffs, that are looking to see what Congress does on the tax code. And they're not going to make those investments until they see a stabilized tax code that doesn't expire at the end of this year, but in fact, gets renewed for 10 years, ideally, permanently, to lock in tax rates so you don't have a massive tax hike on the country.

“We need to remove that uncertainty. The President can't do that. Congress needs to do that, House and Senate combined. So the President is all in. You saw his Truth Social post yesterday. We're all in as well. And yes, members will continue to raise questions. We're going to continue working through that process, but we can't stop the advancement of our agenda. Democrats don't want this economy to turn around, but we do. We ran on it. We're committed to it.”

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