The House voted to approve the Senate GOP budget framework on Thursday, a day after votes were called off due to a conservative rebellion.
It's another victory for Mike Johnson, and another milestone in the reconciliation process.
There's a long way to go.
"By clearing this critical hurdle, House committees can now work in tandem with Senate committees to swiftly prepare their respective parts of the reconciliation bill, keeping us on track for markups during the next work period," the speaker said after the vote.
He and Republican leadership now face the challenging part of this whole process: actually writing the final budget bill, and coming up with as much as $1.5tn in spending cuts to satisfy conservative deficit haws.
Johnson also needs to thread another needle. Ccenter-right Republicans have been clear: they're not voting for a bill (they claim) unless it avoids kicking any Americans off of Medicaid, the nation's low-income health insurance program.
Any bill cutting Medicaid would also have a difficult time passing the Senate, where Republicans have an even thinner margin than the House.
At stake is more than just Johnson's own future as speaker. If Republicans fail to pass a budget aligning with their policy priorities now, they likely won't get another chance before midterm elections next year present the real possibility of one or both chambers falling into Democratic hands.
Donald Trump, like the speaker, knows that wrangling a caucus as wily as the House GOP twice will be difficult — to say nothing about possible restrictions on using the Senate reconciliation process twice.
But Johnson had one main message for reporters on Thursday, after his latest gambit succeeded: "I told you not to doubt us."
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