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Hard-core conservative Republicans have been agitating lately for a follow-up to last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A second budget-reconciliation measure would let them do various things that Democrats would normally be able to block in the Senate, if not in the House. Some want a Second Big Beautiful Bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, such as Trump and Republicans unsuccessfully tried to pass in 2017. Others may want to implement some of Trump’s recent proposals to put thousands of dollars into the pockets of taxpayers right before they vote in the 2026 midterms, deficits be damned.
But whatever fantasies Republicans were harboring seem to have come to an abrupt end. Last week, the president said one Big Beautiful Bill was enough, per Politico:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday ruled out pushing another one-party reconciliation package through Capitol Hill.
“In theory we’ve gotten everything passed that we need,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow. “Now we just need to manage it. But we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”
… The president didn’t rule out any legislation in the remainder of his term, but indicated he’s focusing on smaller-scale bills.
“Do we have other things in mind? Yeah. We do — we have things in mind,” Trump said. “And we have, perfecting a little bit about what we did.”
This means Trump is standing pat for the midterms, at least legislatively. Sure, he and his congressional allies will pursue “messaging bills” like the SAVE Act, which they are currently ventilating about at great length. But they know that such bills won’t survive a Senate filibuster. And it’s abundantly clear by now that Senate Republicans won’t kill the filibuster, either; this is the one thing — perhaps the only thing — they won’t give Trump in a million years, since they need to preserve the filibuster for a future Democratic presidency. So what Trump is admitting is that it’s time to buckle down for the midterms and forget about addressing troublesome issues like health-care costs or ICE outrages that would require a degree of genuine bipartisanship that has largely gone out the window since the president’s second inauguration.
Obviously enough, the president will continue his efforts to expand his own powers to the maximum, making legislation — and Congress itself — largely unnecessary. But if you look closely at what he told Kudlow, he wasn’t just talking about 2026; he said, “We’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years” [emphasis added]. Now, in part he may be thinking of the current brouhaha over ICE; the super-funding of immigration enforcement in the OBBBA means his masked thugs don’t need further money from Congress until every single immigrant has been deported. But more generally, he may feel inclined to stop relying on Congress for much of anything until he leaves the White House in 2029.
The truth is, of course, that he may not be able to rely on Congress for much of anything in the last two years of his presidency. The odds are very high that Republicans will lose control of the House in November. History says so; conditions in the country are nothing like those in the two midterms since FDR when the president’s party didn’t lose House seats. And the handicappers agree: The Kalshi prediction market currently projects a Democratic majority of at least ten seats. Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate, but a Democratic-wave election could still flip the chamber. Even if Republicans lose only the House, you can forget about any budget-reconciliation bills like the OBBBA. And thanks to the torching of bipartisanship by the 47th president and his congressional allies, compounded by Trump’s lame-duck status, there’s precious little Congress will be able to do on a simple majority-vote basis.
Yes, in the waning days of a Trump administration there will still be occasional crises over must-pass legislation involving appropriations and debt limits. (It’s now estimated that the federal debt limit will again be breached by the spring or summer of 2027.) There may be partial or full government shutdowns now and then, which could lead to bipartisan negotiations on spending or even unrelated matters. And a lot of the overall atmospherics in Washington will depend on whether there is a Republican Senate to approve Trump’s judicial and executive-branch appointments (if not, you could see a vast number of judicial openings along with temporary appointments to key federal offices). But any way you slice it, the legislative phase of Trump 2.0 may be coming to an end. And the president himself seems fine with that. Believe it or not, he may become even more aggressive in asserting that he can do whatever he wants without congressional authorization.
