WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders moved rapidly Wednesday to try to pass the party’s massive domestic policy package after the Senate approved it, launching a full-court press and enlisting the help of President Donald Trump to sway a broad group of holdouts.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., can afford only three defections to pass the legislation through his narrow majority, presuming all members attend and Democrats vote against it. Johnson privately huddled just off Capitol Hill with members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, who are demanding deeper spending cuts.
At the White House, Trump was holding multiple meetings with holdouts and on-the-fence members, one GOP lawmaker said, including with the moderate members of the Republican Main Street Caucus.
Within hours of it narrowly passing the Senate on Tuesday, House Republicans advanced the bill through the Rules Committee in a 7-6 vote, with Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., voting “no” due to concerns that it would add to the debt.
Several House conservatives complained that the spending cuts were insufficient after shrinking in the Senate package. They raged against the fact that various provisions were stripped out due to budget rules in the chamber, including immigration-related restrictions they strongly support.
But nearly all of those lawmakers have developed a track record of folding and voting in alignment with Trump when the pressure is on them. GOP leaders are counting on them to do so again.
One House Republican lawmaker said conservatives in the Freedom Caucus used to get political cover from groups like Club for Growth, but Trump has scrambled the calculus on the right. The Club for Growth is backing the bill, and conservative figures like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller are in Trump’s inner circle and some of the loudest cheerleaders for the package.
Freedom Caucus members “have no cover” if they vote no, the lawmaker said Wednesday. “Who’s going to protect them from Trump? Thomas Massie?”
Trump has been in a bitter feud with the conservative Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, threatening to recruit a primary challenger against him after he was one of just two Republicans to vote against the bill in the House in May. Massie, who walks around Capitol Hill wearing a live debt clock, has said the legislation would make the deficit worse and has railed against it.
And politically vulnerable Republicans were unhappy with the more aggressive Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill, along with a series of clean energy funding rollbacks that they warned against.
The Senate-passed bill would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which found that the loss of revenue from tax cuts would outstrip the spending cuts in the legislation.
The legislation would extend the tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017 while boosting funding for immigration enforcement and the military. It would also makes significant cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and clean energy funding, while raising the debt limit by $5 trillion.
On the Capitol steps Wednesday morning, Democrats blasted the legislation as a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by slashing programs that help the working class.
“It is the cruelest bill that I’ve ever seen in my tenure in the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who has served in the House since 1988.
