Why Senate Republicans Need ‘Reconciliation’ to Fund Trump’s Agenda

To achieve the big agenda he’s laid out for his second term, President Donald Trump is leaning heavily on the unilateral powers he wields as the head of the executive branch of government. But for anything requiring or having to do with money, he’ll need the approval of both houses of Congress, which controls government spending. While Trump’s Republican Party has majorities in both, it lacks the 60-vote supermajority needed to pass most legislation in the Senate. As a result, his congressional allies plan to use a workaround known as budget reconciliation.

In theory, 51 out of 100 votes – a simple majority – is needed for a bill to pass through the Senate. This is not, however, how it actually works most of the time. The Senate, envisioned by America’s founders to be a highly deliberative body, was created with no mechanism to end debate on a given topic. Senators quickly realized that long speeches could delay action on legislation they didn’t like. In the 1850s, the practice of talking a bill to death got a name – filibuster, from the Dutch word for “pirate.”