While everyone else was loading their plates and settling in for football, House leaders were working toward a different kind of win: their first crack at Donald Trump’s agenda. While the Super Bowl was in Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) backyard, the Louisianan admitted he’d be working through the weekend, desperately trying to get a playbook together that satisfies the warring sides of his caucus. And it’s not just the clock that’s ticking, he knows. It’s an antsy Senate, threatening to take matters into its own hands.

“We’re almost there,” the speaker insisted ahead of the weekend. “[There are] a couple final details that we’ve got to work out,” he explained of the reconciliation bill that unlocks the door to legislating on the president’s key priorities. While the young attorney tries to thread the needle between his hardline fiscal hawks and the more moderate wing of his party, he’s managed — through several rounds of negotiations and late-night meetings— to offer up at least $1 trillion in cuts. And some conservatives want more.

As Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) explained it, “For every $1 we’re going to spend, at this point, on this reconciliation, [we’ve] got to find $2 to cut. [You’ve] got to find some savings somewhere,” he insisted. “We should just, quite honestly, just go back to the pre-pandemic spending level” of 2019. “When you’re not sick anymore, you don’t keep going to the doctor.”

That’s music to the ears of his rank-and-file conservatives, who’ve pushed hard to slash spending as deep and wide as possible. “I think we’ve always known where the cuts needed to be, it was having the political will to do it,” Rep. John Rutherford (R-Fla.) confessed. “And now that the members have the public behind them, I think they’re much more inclined to step out there and make those cuts.” As Johnson underscored on “Fox News Sunday,” “We have to be good financial stewards. We are going to make sure we find the offsets to do this in a responsible manner.”

As of late last week, there were still some question marks about how much it would cost to extend the president’s tax cuts, which, as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) explained, is one of the most significant discussions. “You’re talking about big changes. You need to make sure [that this isn’t just] something that could pass out of the Budget Committee, but something that can pass the whole House.”

On the other side of the Capitol, GOP senators are apparently tired of waiting on the House to get their members in line and are moving forward with a blueprint of their own — a move that’s caused more than a little consternation for leaders like Scalise. “At the end of the day, the House has unique dynamics,” the majority leader pointed out, “and we’ve got to move based on what the House can come to agreement on. And when we talk about doing one big bill, it includes all of the president’s priorities.” The Senate, on the other hand, seems intent on pursuing a two-bill track, which Scalise worries is a major mistake. “… The Senate’s probably leaving [the president’s] most … high-profile piece out of their first bill. And … there may not be a second bill if they go down that road. And that’s been a big concern from the beginning.”

Johnson was blunt about his conversations with those senators, telling Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill” that “The House is driving the process, and they’ll follow along.” He mentioned that he sent an “early morning text on Friday at 5 a.m.” to Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). “And I said, ‘Gentlemen, give me the space, [and] we’re going to deliver. The House is moving. We’re going to send it to you on a rocket docket. So let us lead this thing, and we’ll achieve the objectives together.’”

In a departure from the House plan, Graham, who oversees the Senate Budget Committee, released his resolution Friday with only border, defense, and energy priorities — pushing the Trump tax cuts to the back burner for now. As Politico put it, this move “officially puts the Senate on a separate, and faster, trajectory than the House, which is still struggling to find consensus on a budget resolution to begin work on a one-bill strategy that would incorporate Trump’s priorities with an extension of expiring tax cuts.”

Look, Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) said, “We understand what the Senate is trying to do in doing two bills so they move quickly.” But at the end of the day, all roads eventually lead through the House. And, Hern continued, “When you have the smallest margin in the last 150 years in Congress, we can’t lose a single vote. You think about that for a second. … Speaker Johnson has been working very hard through the weekend to get us where we can [schedule] a budget mark-up this week, so we can move forward with one big, beautiful bill, as President Trump would like,” Hern explained.

For Johnson, who walks a constant tightrope in his own chamber, butting heads with the Senate is an added layer of stress. To those who complain that it’s taken him too long to get his plan off the ground, he reiterates, “All [of our] deliberation will have paid off here.” And look, he told Perkins, “This is the way Congress is supposed to work. There’s no muscle memory for it, because it hasn’t been done in decades.” Instead, Johnson pointed out, “a small handful of four or five leaders [would] go to a back room and concoct some plan or deal, and then they push it down on all the members. And they’re supposed to just get in line and follow. It doesn’t work that way. When you have a one-vote margin, the smallest in history … this is a bottom-up, member-driven process. And [as speaker], I have to facilitate that, not make the decision and hoist it upon everyone.”

That said, it’s a painstaking process. “For all of us to make the decisions together takes a lot of work,” the speaker underscored. “We’ve got 220 people here working on that on the Republican side alone. And so, we’ve had hours and hours and hours of listening sessions and debates and discussions and all this whiteboarding it. As recently as this week, I spent four hours at the White House on Thursday. The president helped us facilitate some of the final rounds of the discussion.” Thanks to that and some late nights, he expects to have a bill on the table for mark-up this week.

Senator John Kennedy, from Johnson’s home state of Louisiana, tried to tamp down concerns about the dueling strategies. “If we do a bill, Speaker Johnson can always put it on the shelf in the House. And they can get to it when they would like to,” Kennedy said. “I don’t see this as a competition. I see this as: We’ve got a lot to do in the next year.”

So just how worried should we be about the two sides of the Capitol duking it out over strategy? Family Research Council’s Quena González tried to put it all into context. “Part of what we’re seeing in the approaches from the House and Senate reflect the institutions,” he explained to The Washington Stand. “By design, the House is more reflective of the popular will than the Senate. President Trump has become only the second U.S. president to be re-elected to a non-consecutive term, and he has done this by putting together an unprecedented popular coalition. Senate Republicans are much more on board with his agenda than they were eight years ago, but the House naturally more closely reflects not only the division within the country but the competing factions within the Republican Party.”

It should come as no surprise, González said, “that the Senate would opt to focus on three of the major campaign themes that Trump ran on — the border, energy prices, and national security — and want to punt on cutting taxes, cutting government, etc. until later. And it’s no surprise that the House leadership is pushing for ‘one big, beautiful bill’ to get it all done in one fell swoop. Not only is it harder to pass a bill — much less two — in the House than in the Senate, but the House has to balance competing factions that want a broader array of issues addressed, including (for example) defunding abortion businesses.”

As far as Senator Graham is concerned, “It’s important we put points on the board.” How many points — and whose — we’ll soon see.