I spoke to NPR’s Barbara Sprunt for an explainer on how reconciliation works and why it is the key to Trump’s agenda.

“It’s nice to have the Senate majority, and you get pretty titles and gavels, and you can nominally control the floor, but as Schoolhouse Rock! would tell us, unless you have 60 votes for most things, you can’t move forward,” said Liam Donovan, a political strategist.
“It’s become the preferred tool over the past 25 years in this modern, partisan political era,” said Donovan.
“The amendments that happen in the final legislative package are really important — you’re playing with live ammunition when you’re on that final stage of reconciliation,” said Donovan.

Listen to the full interview here.

Sean Craig picked up my comments in The Daily Beast on the behind-the-scenes House GOP fight over the Trump tax cuts.

However, that would leave Republicans without the necessary wiggle room to implement any of Trump’s tax policies apart from the extension of the tax cuts from his first administration.
“There will absolutely have to be trade-offs,” Republican strategist Liam Donovan told Politico. “You simply can’t fit it all into that.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Benjamin Guggenheim and Meredith Lee Hill for POLITICO on GOP tax cuts and budget reconciliation.

The number that lawmakers had tentatively settled on last Thursday — around $4.7 trillion — would make it virtually impossible to implement anything above an extension of the expiring tax cuts. House Republicans agreed during their White House meeting last week that they would permanently extend the 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated by Congress’ official accountants as costing $4.6 trillion.
The $4.7 trillion figure “is an implicit acknowledgement that something will have to give,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, in an interview.
“[T]here will absolutely have to be trade-offs. You simply can’t fit it all into that,” Donovan said.

Read the full piece here.