Late on Sunday, the House Budget Committee passed Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful” reconciliation bill in a 17-16 vote after four holdout conservative members voted “present” rather than “nay.” This moves the bill to the Rules Committee which is scheduled to consider it at 1am on Wednesday when most people will be asleep. What do these developments mean?

There has been no point in this budget process where the Republicans have ever had majority support for anything. Yet, so far, they’ve succeeded in pushing the process along by asking members to set aside their opposition for the moment in the interest of keeping the process going. This is how they managed to get both the House and Senate to pass a concurrent budget resolution in April that neither chamber actually supported.

The whole ball game here is to avoid the Senate filibuster and thereby any need to negotiate with or make concessions to the Democrats. To make this work, the GOP needs to use the budget reconciliation process, and the prerequisite for that is passing a budget resolution. If Republican opponents of the budget plans had refused to pass the resolution in April, the whole effort would have been stillborn. That’s why it was relatively easy to get skeptical members to go along to get along with promises that their concerns could be addressed later.

The same thing happened on Sunday night when conservative opponents, who had killed the first effort to pass the bill through the Budget Committee on Friday, responded to vague promises by voting “present.” They made no commitment to supporting the bill when it comes up for a vote before the full House, but they agreed to move the bill to the next step, which is the Rules Committee.

Two of those four conservatives also serve on the Rules Committee, so they haven’t yet completely given up their leverage and they’re still insisting on changes. The kinds of changes they want will lose votes from the middle. So, although the process keeps moving forward in the House, the core obstacles that have existed from the beginning still remain.

Perhaps it will help to stop momentarily here and reflect on the timeline. The House wants to pass this bill before Memorial Day and hand it off to the Senate. The Senate’s goal is to then work on and pass their own version and reconcile the two versions for final congressional passage before July 4 and the summer recess. For one thing, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling before it recesses, which the GOP would like to do as part of this one big, beautiful bill. For another, they don’t want to be working on this in September or risk Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lapsing at the end of the year.

The urgency of the situation works in Speaker Mike Johnson’s favor as he tries to wrangle near-unanimous support for the bill from his Republican caucus. What’s working against him is that he doesn’t have much remaining time to find that unanimity. He does, however, have one remaining card to play, and it’s the same one he’s already successfully played a few times. He can ask his members to just keep the process rolling, this time by passing the problem off to the Senate.

Because, remember, there is ultimately only one vote that matters, and that’s the one that would turn this whole saga into actual laws. Members of Congress will be held far more accountable for actually stripping millions people of their health insurance, for example, than they will be for voting for this before they vote against it. For fiscal conservatives concerned about the debt and deficits created by this bill, nothing they vote for during the process will impact that. If they’re not satisfied in the end, they can always vote against final passage.

For these reasons, Speaker Johnson still has a good, but uncertain, chance of getting the House version passed before Memorial Day.

But punting to the Senate doesn’t guarantee anything. Republican senators, looking at this process unfold in the House, are already queasy. So, queasy, in fact, that several members are telling The Hill that they want to scrap the whole process and start over.

Senate Republicans say the House-drafted bill to enact President Trump’s legislative agenda has “problems” and are taking a second look at breaking it up into smaller pieces in hopes of getting the president’s less controversial priorities enacted into law before the fall.

Even if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) manages to squeak Trump’s agenda through the House, it faces major obstacles in the Senate, where moderate Republicans say they oppose proposed cuts to Medicaid and fiscal conservatives say it doesn’t go nearly far enough in cutting the deficit.

But here’s the thing about budget reconciliation bills: it’s not so easy to break them up into smaller pieces and it’s much easier to do if you take that approach at the outset. You may remember that back in February, Vice-President J.D. Vance and Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted to pursue two budget reconciliation bills rather than just one, but they were overruled by Trump and Speaker Johnson.

Now, we’re seeing senators like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and John Hoeven of North Dakota lament that outcome and call for reconsideration. But there’s a problem.

[Sen. Ron] Johnson, one of the Senate’s leading fiscal hawks, said Thune and the rest of the Senate GOP leadership team is reluctant to scrap the House’s package and start over again.

“When I talk about a multiple-step process, they always say, ‘That ship has sailed,’” Johnson said of his conversations with Senate GOP leaders.

“I say, ‘Well, bring it back to port,’” he added.

Without getting too in the weeds, there’s a reason why Johnson is being told that “that ship has sailed.” It’s because, while it is possible to have multiple reconciliation bills in one calendar year, there can be only one budget reconciliation bill per fiscal year.

Since your eyes just glazed over, let me give an example. In 2017, Congress used the fiscal year 2018 budget resolution to pass Trump’s tax cuts. But they simultaneously attempted (and failed) to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act using the fiscal year 2017 budget resolution. The only reason this was possible was because Congress had not passed a budget resolution for fiscal year 2017 in 2016. Therefore, the Republicans retroactively passed it a year later.

Similarly, Congress did not pass a budget resolution for 2025 in 2024 but rather financed the government through a series of continuing resolutions. What Vance and Thune wanted to do back in February was to pass two budget resolutions exactly as was done in 2017. One would be used for immigration, energy and cuts to medical spending, and the other would be passed later and deal with thorny tax issues, including extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the rich.

But since Congress chose not to pursue this path, they did not pass two separate budget resolutions. As a result, all of their priorities wound up in “one big, beautiful bill” rather than two.

There are limited options for how to change this now.

The first and most obvious is to start the process of passing a second budget reconciliation resolution, It would have to be for the fiscal year we are currently in that ends in September, but that in itself isn’t an obstacle. It’s just a laborious process and it would require amending the budget resolution they’re currently working on to adjust the targeted cuts down. It actually is possible to amend an already passed budget resolution, but it would take time and raise complications.

If the goal is to speed things up, I don’t think this would work.

They could also amend the existing budget resolution to split off the debt ceiling vote as a standalone reconciliation bill, and even further for one bill for outlays and another for revenues, but it’s unclear how this would resolve the fundamental problems the GOP is facing in getting unanimity.

For all these reasons, it seems like Johnson’s suggestion isn’t workable, and that’s why he’s been told that it’s too late to bring the ship back to port.

If, as seems not unlikely, Speaker Johnson succeeds in punting the bill onto Sen. Johnson’s plate, the Senate will feel tremendous pressure to pass their own version before the summer recess. But there’s a reason we’re seeing so many senators express doubt about the prospects of success. Their best chance follows the same logic as what’s working for Speaker Johnson, which is a desire not to be left holding the bag and solely responsible for failure.

The Senate may pass a bill that is acceptable to their members but that has no chance of getting unanimity from House Republicans.

Eventually, there will be a reckoning when a vote will decide if a reconciliation bill will pass or not. I don’t know for sure when that reckoning will come. The first test will come before July 4th and be driven as much as anything by the need to raise the debt ceiling. If the GOP can’t do the debt ceiling as part of the one big, beautiful bill, they will have to split that part off and get it done, leaving the rest for after the recess.

That, in itself, could be a huge disaster as it probably would force the GOP to seek Democratic votes which would require concessions. They want to avoid concessions at all costs.

So, in conclusion, yes, the House Republicans succeeded in moving the reconciliation bill through the Budget Committee on Sunday night, but that doesn’t mean they’re really any closer to passing it.