After a failed vote on Friday and some negotiations over the weekend, the House Budget Committee returned late Sunday night and advanced the reconciliation bill.
Eleven minutes into the late-night markup, after Democrats complained that Republicans hadn’t even made them aware of the changes being made to the bill, the committee’s chair, Rep. Jodey Arrington, shut down debate and moved to a vote.
“No more parliamentary inquiries, we’re going to finish this business,” Arrington said.
The four Republicans who voted against the bill on Friday — Reps. Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, Josh Brecheen and Andrew Clyde — instead voted “present” Sunday night, allowing the bill to move forward on a 17-16 vote.
The House Rules Committee is now expected to take up the legislation sometime this week, as leadership targets a Thursday floor vote. But hitting these timelines will still take something of a legislative miracle.
The four conservatives who voted “present” notably didn’t vote in favor of the legislation. Instead, their present votes seemed to indicate progress in the negotiations, not a finished deal.
“Deliberations continue at this very moment,” Arrington said Sunday. “They will continue on into the week, and I suspect right up until the time we put this ‘big, beautiful bill’ on the floor of the House.”
While it wasn’t immediately unclear what concessions Speaker Mike Johnson had made to get the four holdouts to a place where they felt comfortable advancing the legislation, Norman confirmed before the budget vote that there were changes made to the bill.
“We have to move this bill forward,” Norman said. “I’m excited about the changes we’ve made.”
Norman’s declaration led to an obvious question from Democrats on the committee: “Wait, what changes?” as one member shouted.
That wasn’t immediately clear. But Roy and other Republicans have been pushing to change the date of enactment on some of the cuts in the bill, particularly Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied recipients.
The reconciliation bill had set up those policy changes to start in 2029 — after the next presidential election — but Roy and his Freedom Caucus colleagues have been adamant that those requirements should come sooner.
Conservatives also wanted certain policies in the Inflation Reduction Act phased out sooner, though it wasn’t yet clear if leaders had gone along with those asks.
As leaders make the bill more appealing to conservatives, they’re also giving moderates more reasons to vote no.
“Many of us are fed up with the handful of HFC guys who defeated the bill in the Budget Committee,” moderate Rep. Don Bacon texted NOTUS on Friday.
“These guys largely set the target numbers. We all negotiated in good faith and reached the numbers. Everyone had to compromise. Then these yahoos say it’s not good enough,” Bacon said. “Many of us say move on and negotiate with the Senate. These guys will always move the goalposts.”
Looming over House negotiations is the Senate. Although conservatives want sweeping Medicaid cuts enacted as soon as possible, there are at least three Senate Republicans who have signaled general opposition to almost all cuts, let alone major restrictions on Medicaid enacted on an accelerated timeline.
Conservatives in the House, however, are focused on passing a bill that fits with their vision.
Roy spent much of the weekend on social media airing his grievances with the legislation, demanding those Medicaid work requirements and calling for an end to, what he says is, $400 billion in “Green New Scam” subsidies re-upped in the legislation.
But with conservatives apparently onboard with advancing the bill — at least for now — leaders also have to resolve a standoff with some blue-state Republicans over the state and local tax deduction.
These lawmakers — mostly coming from New York, New Jersey and California and belonging to the SALT caucus — balked at leadership’s initial offer to raise the $10,000 cap to $30,000.
The SALT holdouts have insisted they are willing to stake their careers on the issue, and they say they will use every bit of leverage they have to up the cap. With Johnson’s three-vote margin, their leverage at the moment is substantial.
Leadership has some wiggle room to increase the cap, with the tax portion of their bill only adding about $3.8 trillion over 10 years to the deficit when Republicans thought it would be north of $4 trillion. Increasing the cap, which would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1% of Americans, could cost billions. But instituting the Medicaid work requirements sooner would also give Republicans more runway to play with on the spending side.
With House factions staking out firm positions, however, it makes the whole reconciliation process seem more doubtful. Senators seem far off from adopting the House’s provisions on Medicaid, but there are also conservatives in the Senate who don’t want to pass a bill with a substantial budgetary impact that won’t be offset.
Sen. Rand Paul has always seemed like a doubtful vote for the final product — he has already voted against the GOP’s budget — and Sen. Mike Lee is also starting to look like a tough vote for Republicans, particularly if his colleagues insist on ditching the House’s Medicaid cuts.
“The ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ won’t be beautiful—not even close—unless it reins in our deficit,” Lee posted Saturday on X.
“It currently falls far short of that,” he said.
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Daniella Diaz is a reporter at NOTUS. Haley Byrd Wilt, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.