Speaker Mike Johnson’s barely existent majority puts him in a difficult but familiar position with the reconciliation bill: desperately working different factions of his conference to secure the votes.
But as much as it’s Johnson’s job to build support for the legislation, Republicans are clear that President Donald Trump is the one who will eventually have to get this over the line.
And it’ll be Trump’s job to win over whomever is holding out.
“Whatever the product ultimately looks like, you’re gonna need top cover from the president to sell it,” one senior GOP lawmaker told NOTUS, requesting anonymity to discuss the political dynamics.
Republican House leaders got conservatives onboard — with a budget that doesn’t balance, that lifts the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and that sets up $4.5 trillion in tax cuts — by promising $2 trillion in spending cuts. A healthy portion of those reductions are essentially earmarked for Medicaid, which would be a politically toxic move for vulnerable Republicans.
But leaders got vulnerable Republicans onboard by assuring them the Senate would never go along with that plan, according to two members involved in the discussions.
The pitch was, essentially, advance the budget now so we can jam the other guys later.
The problem is, no one is really sure which faction is the other guys. Only one group can win, and in a compromise, both sides could lose.
Moderates are betting that it’s conservatives who end up swallowing the worse side. They think the president will force hard-liners to accept a reconciliation bill shorn of the unpopular spending cuts. The political costs of including Medicaid reductions, they say, are simply too steep.
“We are going to lose a great deal and have big problems if Medicaid isn’t taken care of,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a former Democrat who became a Republican in 2019 while in Congress, told NOTUS.
“So the bottom line is something’s got to change, and it will change in the Senate,” Van Drew said. “And if it doesn’t change, the president of the United States is going to be upset.”
Van Drew added that Trump assured him several times he did not want massive cuts to Medicaid. Instead, Trump continues to insist he just wants to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” in the program.
Another vulnerable Republican member made a similar point, telling NOTUS they believe the outcome will be that Trump “holds the line on any painful cuts” and “twists” the arms of Freedom Caucus members instead. Freedom Caucus members, after all, generally come from safer districts, and they are less likely to survive a primary if Trump is against them.
“He’s going to have a harder time threatening to primary Republican members of moderate districts,” yet another GOP lawmaker said. “A Freedom Caucus member can get hit by a bus tomorrow and they’re guaranteed to be replaced by a Republican. Don Bacon gets hit by a bus, Juan Ciscomani gets hit by a bus, David Valadao gets hit by a bus, you’re not replacing them with a Republican.”
But members of the Freedom Caucus think they’ll win a budget reconciliation standoff.
“This town is really good at smoke and mirrors and putting forward something that’s not genuine and the math is not real, and I don’t think that’s what Trump wants,” Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the caucus, told NOTUS. “That’s not what I want. And so I think that he genuinely wants to fix our fiscal problems.”
Another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Ralph Norman, said that if the Senate clawed back some cuts, it would be a “huge problem” for the conservative group.
If there are substantial changes to the budget resolution, Norman continued, “we’re out.”
Another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Byron Donalds, insisted that political survival for vulnerable Republicans shouldn’t be part of the calculation when deciding the ultimate policies in the reconciliation bill.
“Everybody can have their own internal political calculations about what’s better for them politically, but inflation is a nation killer, and the way you wring inflation out is you cut spending. Period,” Donalds told NOTUS.
Of course, Republicans faced a similar dynamic with conservatives and moderates during Trump’s first term, when the GOP unsuccessfully tried to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Many Republicans campaigned on the promise that, for all of Obamacare’s faults, they would preserve protections for people with preexisting conditions. Moderates said they couldn’t survive an election if they were forced to go back on their word.
And yet, when push came to shove, when the Freedom Caucus refused to budge on a health care bill that didn’t redefine those protections, Trump and House Republican leaders forced moderates to swallow a bill that established high-risk pools.
The Freedom Caucus proved it was unwilling to compromise, and moderates proved they were willing to go along.
Still, there are some indications that the dynamic now is very different from the one in 2017.
For one, some Freedom Caucus members already don’t think they’re going to win this battle.
Rep. Andy Ogles, a member of the caucus, told NOTUS that his Freedom Caucus colleagues are realizing now they’re “gonna get screwed some way.”
“It was just a matter of how and by whom,” Ogles said.
For another, Freedom Caucus members have a much different political calculus today than they did eight years ago.
Over the course of Trump’s first term, the caucus transformed from a conservative organization to a pro-Trump group. Going against the president is perhaps even more politically unpalatable for them than a vulnerable Republican voting for Medicaid cuts.
Consider Burlison.
He was one of the Republicans who attended a meeting at the White House on Wednesday to discuss conservative opposition to continuing resolutions. Many Republicans are reflexively repulsed by stopgap spending bills, and they’re particularly allergic to funding the government by extending a spending deal that was negotiated under a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president.
But when Burlison emerged from the meeting Wednesday, he was ready to support a CR for the rest of the fiscal year — if that’s what Trump wants.
“I’ve never voted for a CR, but I’m willing to consider it to back the president, if necessary,” Burlison told Politico.
Moderates are counting on a lot more of that.
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Reese Gorman and Daniella Diaz are reporters at NOTUS.