When the House takes up President Donald Trump’s marquee reconciliation bill on Wednesday, it will be quite a different measure from the one House Republicans passed less than six weeks ago.
Speaker Mike Johnson wants potential defectors to suck it up and vote for the legislation anyway.
When asked about moderates and conservatives trashing the bill, Johnson wasn’t sympathetic to their concerns.
“Welcome to Congress,” Johnson said Tuesday. “It’s a disappointing job sometimes.”
While the usually optimistic Johnson was much more tempered about the prospect of actually passing the Senate’s reconciliation language before Trump’s self-imposed deadline of July 4 — “We’ll see what happens in the next 24 hours,” Johnson said — it’s clear he expects Republicans to hold their noses and vote “yes.”
And he wants them to support the legislation in a matter of hours, without lawmakers really reviewing a Senate product that was changing up until the last minutes of the vote-a-rama — and definitely without changing it.
The Senate rewrote major parts of the domestic policy bill, and the package has definitely become a tougher pill to swallow for many factions of the House GOP.
Conservatives hate that the overall price tag is now roughly $3.9 trillion, up from the $2.4 trillion cost in the version the House passed. Moderates hate that the Medicaid cuts increased from about $700 billion over the next decade to about $1 trillion. And blue-state House Republicans don’t love the compromise they struck with senators over the state and local tax deduction, which will go back down from $40,000 to a $10,000 cap in roughly four years.
But Johnson is hoping he can ram through the legislation on momentum and exhaustion.
For all of the bill’s perceived faults for Republicans, almost every GOP lawmaker is united on the principle that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts ought to be renewed. And just about every Republican wants to hand Trump a win. Preferably before July 4.
To do that, the House can’t change the legislation. And pretty much every Republican leader agrees the process would be much cleaner if the House just accepted the Senate bill.
“I appreciate the narrow margins they have over there and the challenges the speaker and his team have in front of him, but I think we gave them a really strong product,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Tuesday. “I think we took what they sent us and strengthened and improved upon it. And so I’m hopeful that now, when it gets sent over there, as they deliberate about how they want to handle it, they’ll find the votes that are necessary to pass it.”
While Johnson was less enthusiastic about what the Senate sent over — “I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product,” he said Tuesday — he still acknowledged that his job was to get his members onboard.
“We understand this is the process,” Johnson said. “It goes back and forth and we’ll be working to get all our members to ‘yes.’”
But getting there won’t be easy. In fact, it might be impossible without House Republicans putting their mark on the legislation and sending it back to the Senate.
“The Senate took a bill that had a year’s worth of work in it — and in a month turned it into a shit sandwich,” one House Republican lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told NOTUS.
“At the end of the day, what the Senate did is disrespectful to the president because they’re saying, ‘We don’t care if you get two years with a Republican House and Senate or four,’” this lawmaker continued.
Other Republicans are just as displeased.
Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said Tuesday that the Senate bill was “not ready for prime time.”
“The last-minute changes in the Senate, like literally the very last amendment, probably added another $100 billion to that deficit,” Harris told Fox News.
He, like many other conservatives, wants to further rein in spending and reduce the overall price tag. And luckily for the Freedom Caucus, the group extracted promises regarding the legislation’s overall spending contours that could make it easier for them to stand up to Trump — as much as they’ve shown that they’re loath to do so.
Before the bill can even reach the floor, it has to clear the Rules Committee first, where it’s already facing some GOP resistance.
Rep. Ralph Norman, a Freedom Caucus member who sits on the Rules panel, said he’s a “no” to even advance the legislation to the floor.
“What we ought to do is take exactly the House bill that we sent over and go home and say, ‘When you’re serious, come back,’” Norman said. “That’s my message: Send the House bill back, and when they’re serious, come back to us.”
More moderate House Republicans could also present a real challenge.
While Republicans accepted more than $700 billion in Medicaid cuts in the House bill, the Senate deepened those cuts and crossed some red lines for House lawmakers.
Most notably, included in the Senate bill is a cut to the Medicaid provider tax, which a group of vulnerable House Republicans already said they would not accept.
At least two Republicans — Reps. David Valadao and Jeff Van Drew — have already said they would oppose the bill if nothing changes.
After moderate GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski cast the deciding vote Tuesday, she told reporters her hope was that “the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”
Of course, part of recognizing that the legislation may need changes could be cutting some of the individual sweeteners Murkowski extracted for Alaska.
Conservatives are already upset about the bill’s price tag. A $50 billion fund to help rural hospitals adjust to Medicaid cuts, a tax targeting wind and solar, even a provision allowing Alaskan fishermen to expense their meals were all part of the cost of Murkowski’s vote. And they all could be on the short list for what conservatives want out of the bill.
But on top of the drama from the Republican conference, Democratic leaders have their own plans to hold up the process and ensure Republicans don’t painlessly pass the bill before Trump’s July 4 deadline.
One tactic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries could use is his unlimited “magic minute,” afforded to party leaders, to delay the vote for the bill. (Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, then the House Minority Leader, holds the record for continuously speaking in the House, when he held up the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act by speaking for eight hours and 33 minutes in 2021.)
House Democrats are also trying to hold up the bill in the Rules Committee, which is still ongoing. They used the same tactic the first time the legislation went through committee.
“This last go around we were able to delay the bill upwards of 30 hours, so we’re going to do the same thing,” Rep. Maxwell Frost said Tuesday evening. “Do everything we can from a procedural point of view to delay this. The longer this bill is in the ether, the more unpopular it becomes.”
Jeffries told reporters House Democrats expect full attendance and will stand in unified opposition when the bill comes to a vote, which would mean Republicans could only afford to lose three votes on their side before the bill goes down.
“Shame on Senate Republicans for passing this disgusting abomination. And shame on House Republicans for continuing to bend the knee to Donald Trump’s extreme agenda,” Jeffries said at a press conference Tuesday. “All procedural legislative options are on the table.”
To be clear, Republicans have caved before — and Republican leaders expect them to cave again.
House Republican lawmakers have been incredibly loyal to Trump and have repeatedly done as he’s asked when he personally gets involved lobbying for his legislative priorities.
Plenty of Republicans expect it to happen again.
When asked whether he believed the bill would pass the House by the Fourth of July, Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, told NOTUS: “Absolutely.”
“Look at the votes when it passes. I’ll be right,” he said.
Smith and Vice President JD Vance held a strategy meeting Tuesday on how to try to get the bill through the House, according to a source familiar with the matter.
But there is so much to accomplish in such a short time that just about any hiccup could throw off Republicans.
Even Vance didn’t sound confident that the House could pass the bill by Independence Day.
Asked about what his message was to the House as many in the conference don’t like the bill, as he left the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, Vance said, “We’ll see what happens.”
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Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.