by John Solomon
Between a legislature subject to presidential veto, his powers of the pardon and the hue and cry of "revenge" from Democrats publicly targeting Trump and his administration members, Trump may be emboldened to act unilaterally on several issues before the "Blue Wave" actually washes ashore.
President Donald Trump has already signaled he is willing to play offense in the final two years of his presidency, undeterred by Democrats’ election gains and certain that doubling down on the most popular aspects of his agenda is the strategy for a 2028 GOP comeback.
Republicans in Congress, however, have not shown that sort of swagger, even when they owned all three levers of power in Washington. But in recent days, GOP lawmakers expressed in interviews with Just the News a dozen or more major ideas to pigeonhole the new Democrat majorities, rally the MAGA base and begin to make the case for independent, young male, black and Hispanic voters to return to the coalition by the next presidential election.
Here are eight of those ideas:
- Pass multiyear agency budgets for all key agencies that lock in federal spending until after Trump leaves office
This idea came up more than any in the interviews, both because it erases the failure of the GOP to markedly reshape and cut spending over the last two years and because it would hamstring Democrats from shutting down government or enforcing their priorities in 2027 or 2028. If two or three-year budgets were passed in a reconciliation bill that requires only 51 GOP votes in the Senate, all of Trump’s immigration, law enforcement, election integrity, education, military regulatory reform and foreign aid priorities would be locked, and he could simply veto any Democrat efforts to reverse them.
This blueprint was already executed with the Homeland Security budget passed this summer. A similar roadmap for all spending bills could be followed to keep government funded until 2029. No excuses, no shutdowns and all GOP priorities locked in until a new president takes office.
The most common ideas for the spending bills were: locking in the elimination of USAID and wasteful foreign spending, reducing the Education Department to a shell of a federal bureaucracy, sending tax dollars to the states in bloc grants, making voter ID and citizenship checks mandatory for all states that take food stamp benefits, Medicaid, highway funds, FEMA, DOJ or Homeland grant money, formalizing the environmental regulatory reform agenda enacted by executive orders and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and fully funding the military, FBI, DOJ and immigration enforcement priorities he campaigned and won on.
- Put downward pressure on interest rates by taking a decisive strike against budget deficits and debt.
No actions would more impress Wall Street, bond markets or everyday Americans than launching the first meaningful strike against runaway spending, something that’s been promised since the Reagan era and the Tea Party movement. Trump doesn’t have time in a lame-duck Congress to enact all the fine print for a long-term plan. But he does have time to impose across the board cuts and prioritize where the savings money goes.
The two most popular ideas in the interviews were: enacting within the reconciliation bill a mandatory 15% reduction in each agency’s spending over the next two years but leaving it to the agencies on where to make the cuts; and naming a bipartisan debt and deficit commission to develop recommendations on a long-term strategy to get to a balanced budget to reduce the debt and building tariffs into a national revenue strategy.
According to the Brookings Institution, reconciliation has been used since 1980 to enact 23 bills as of the end of 2024 (four others were passed but vetoed by the president), including such significant pieces of legislation as major deficit reduction bills in the 1980s and 1990s, welfare reform in 1996, the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, the Trump tax cuts in 2017, and the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden.
- Whipsaw Democrats with a major effort to save Medicare and Social Security.
The Democrats ignored this issue most important to middle America throughout the 2026 campaign, instead focusing on expanding the welfare state and socialist government expansion. Yet, according to a Congressional Budget Office document cited by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, both funds are less than seven years from being bankrupt. Trump could become the first president in a half century to deal with this crisis, refusing to kick this can of crisis down the street any longer.
Boomers and Gen X would benefit. The premise of the fix is simple: rerouting savings and the spoils of fighting fraud to the Social Security and Medicare funds to repay funds long pilfered through budget trickery.
Trump could declare, with the help of the reconciliation bill, a third of the mandatory federal agency budget cuts (5%) could be re-allocated to Medicare and Social Security as well as all monies recovered from the massive crackdown led by Vice President J.D. Vance and Attorney General Todd Blanche to the trust funds until they reach a solvency date of 2045.
- Strike at the left’s richest war chest: Nonprofits that fund ideology and politics instead of genuine charitable purposes
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could work on two executive orders with Trump that could be codified in the reconciliation bill. The first would sanction many tax-exempt nonprofits that have ties to terrorism, anarchism, Communism, socialism, sex trafficking, abortion advocacy, medical harm to children too young to consent to transgender procedures, personal enrichment and overt political activity.
Such sanctions would immediately suspend these nonprofits' tax-exempt status and refer them to DOJ and the FBI for possible prosecution or civil action. There are many more Southern Poverty Law Centers yet to be exposed.
The second EO would declare that all nonprofits be required to demonstrate by July 2027 that their work substantially contributes to the primary purpose of tax breaks: charitable good. Those that can’t would lose their tax-exempt status at the beginning of the 2028 fiscal years, which is next Oct. 1.
- Sue to block the Democrat-led state compact seeking to end the Electoral College
Republicans have dangerously yawned for more than a decade as left-leaning states have pushed for ratification of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would require states to award electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote rather than the way the Founding Fathers intended in the Constitution.
Now that Democrats flipped numerous state legislatures, the GOP’s inaction has put the compact at the brink of being implemented in enough states to give Democrats a long-term blue wall. Many liberal publications declare so after Tuesday’s election. While Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, a corrective measure would hew to the letter and spirit of the Constitution in future races.
States that join the NPVIC are committing to assigning their state’s electoral votes in future elections based on a national vote, not the will of the majority of the state’s voters. There are several challenges under the Constitution, including the equal protection clause and the 14th Amendment’s protection of representative government. But the Constitution explicitly declares that "no State shall, without the Consent of Congress [...] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” Congress has never approved states entering into the NPVIC. Voters in states where this has been approved would likely have standing to sue, as would the Justice Department, lawmakers argued in interviews.
- Rewire federal education policy with a major elimination, a bloc grant strategy and a protection of parent’s rights and choices
Conservatives have clamored since Jimmy Carter's presidency that the U.S. Education Department is an illegal expansion of federal authority because education was always intended by our Founding Fathers to be a locally controlled policy and not the responsibility of the central federal government.
They’ve yammered plenty but never taken any meaningful action until Trump’s second term and Education Secretary Linda McMahon has achieved considerable agency shrinkage. But those cuts can be reversed in the blink of a eye of a future Democrat president.
The lame-duck Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver on decades of empty promise. Congress in the reconciliation bill could downgrade the Education Department from a Cabinet agency to a federal office and put it inside another agency like Treasury or DOJ. But it can survive the likely Democrat demagoguery by taking the savings and increasing the amount of federal funds that go to states to help schools.
This rewiring could also tie federal education funds – school lunch monies, bloc grants, etc. – to the states' willingness to protect three popular conservative-leaning policy mandates that survived the "Blue Wave": women’s sports are only for women, parents’ rights to guide their children’s education, health and welfare are supreme to the wishes of school boards, education administrators and teachers and tax dollars should follow children to the schools that their parents choose.
States would be free to impose any policies they wanted – perhaps risking suit by DOJ over civil liberty issues – but they would have to forgo any federal education and school lunch monies if they left boys in girls' sports, infringed on parent’s rights and sought to reverse school choice initiatives.
- Eliminate liberal lawfare’s favorite fund-raising tool: court-directed settlement money from sue-and-settle cases.
The environmental movement and other liberal causes managed to fund themselves with tens of billions of dollars by suing oil and energy companies and other corporations and securing settlements approved by courts that then directed the money back to their causes. This created a court-sanctioned fund-raising scheme for liberal causes.
Congress could neuter this quickly in the reconciliation bill by mandating that all federal lawsuit penalties must be awarded to the U.S. treasury for debt relief, Medicare and Social Security and that any awards reached through settlement or judicial decree can only be awarded to parties who were proven to have suffered actual harm.
- Impose voter ID and election citizenship checking through the reconciliation bill by tying their compliance to Homeland Security, Medicaid and law enforcement funds
Even as they rejected Republicans in the last election, voters in several states (except California) made clear once again they love voter ID and citizenship checks as an election integrity measure. Senate Republicans don’t have 60 votes to impose it as a policy, but they could easily muster 51 votes to mandate it through federal funding ties. All the lame-duck Congress would have to do is tie voter ID and citizenship checks to the state’s ability to receive Homeland Security, Medicaid and law enforcement funding. No state can afford to forgo those.
- Break-up private monopolies that act as quasi-government bodies while operating as liberal cartels
Over the last several decades, several private bodies directly aligned with liberals have functioned like quasi-government bodies, including groups like the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association and teacher’s unions.
These no longer act as just free-speech trade groups, as the House showed in a series of explosive oversight hearings this summer. They essentially act as licensing and curriculum-setting bodies by virtue of their reach and actions. They have been exposed by Congress as aligned solely with Democrats as adjuncts to the left’s lawfare policy and in the case of teacher unions, fund-raising machines.
Congress as well as Trump agencies, could take decisive action in the tax code, labor law or other venues to break these groups' ability to act as licensing agents for lawyers and curriculum and policy setters that discriminate against and punish those who don’t publicly share their values.
John Solomon
Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/power-moves-trump-republicans-can-execute-during-lame-duck
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