House Speaker Mike Johnson, with backing from the White House, is making plans to muscle through the GOP’s domestic-policy megabill Wednesday, with top Republicans seeking to quickly quash a last-minute rebellion from conservative hard-liners.
The plans for a quick vote were described by three senior Republicans involved in the closely held negotiations who were granted anonymity to discuss them. They have developed amid rising frustrations on the hard right over a key tax deduction sought by blue-state Republicans and what they consider to be a walk-back of an agreement overnight on other concessions they have been seeking.
Several of the GOP hard-liners emerged from a late-morning meeting dismissing Johnson’s plan of passing the megabill through the House by Memorial Day, saying that substantial negotiations remained over issues such as Medicaid, clean-energy subsidies and other issues.
Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who leads the House Freedom Caucus, said the holdouts had “accepted the White House’s offer last night,” referring to a handshake deal to speed up Medicaid work requirements and the phase-out of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, but then said their concerns had been “inadequately” addressed by House GOP leadership. He cast doubt on passage of the bill Wednesday.
“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” he said.
Another key holdout, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, cited “progress” but said “there’s a long way to go.”
But top Republican leaders and President Donald Trump, whose policy agenda is embedded in the roughly 1,100-word bill, are in no mood to wait. They have grown frustrated, the senior Republicans said, that the ultraconservatives have shifted their demands after closing in on a deal late Tuesday evening.
And they are concerned, with the upcoming holiday weekend, that the GOP will have member attendance problems is the vote pushes much past Wednesday night.
The dispute is set to come to a head Wednesday at a 3 p.m. White House meeting where Trump and Johnson are expected to pressure the hard-liners to come to a deal. “It’s going very well,” Trump told reporters Wednesday morning. “We’re very close.”
Johnson’s leadership team is tracking roughly a half-dozen hard holdouts. But they believe they will be able to force through a procedural vote and final passage of the megabill, with potentially three defections. The holdouts, for now, are privately threatening to tank the procedural vote setting up final floor debate on the bill.
A key holdup is that the conservatives are continuing to push for deeper changes to Medicaid, the safety-net health program currently serving nearly 80 million Americans. The pending bill implements new work requirements for some beneficiaries, and leaders have discussed speeding up implementation by two years to placate the holdouts.
But Republicans involved in the talks say the hard-liners are pushing for more. They want to reduce the federal share of some Medicaid costs, known as FMAP, and to further limit the use of provider taxes in states that expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act by lowering the so-called safe harbor rate from the current 6 percent to 4 percent.
GOP leaders are drawing a hard line in negotiations against further changes to Medicaid, citing their own members wariness about pursuing deeper cuts and Trump’s own reticence to to slash health care benefits. “Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” he told lawmakers in a closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday.
Also infuriating the conservatives is a tentative deal leaders reached Tuesday night with a group of blue-state Republicans to boost the cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction to $40,000. Conservatives have strongly opposed further increasing the SALT cap.
Harris cited the agreement in an early morning Newsmax interview Wednesday: “I think actually we’re further away from a deal because that SALT cap increase, I think, upset a lot of conservatives,” he said, adding that “conservatives are pushing for some balancing spending reductions.”
Around that time, a person with direct knowledge of the talks who was granted anonymity to describe them candidly said “there is currently a zero percent chance this thing moves today,” saying leaders “walked away from a deal last night and even rolled back progress made over the weekend.”
In a brief interview Wednesday morning before the meeting with Harris, Roy and others, Johnson said “there is a chance for a vote today.”
Harris said in the Newsmax interview that hard-liners stopped negotiating just before midnight Wednesday, saying there was a deal but it was “pulled off the table.” He suggested that the deal would make further cuts to Medicaid and take more aggressive action to pull back on Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for clean energy development, saying those two issues are “pretty essential” to get his support.
“This bill actually got worse overnight,” Harris said. “There is no way it passes today. … We may need a couple of weeks to iron everything out.”
Johnson can afford to lose only a few GOP votes ahead of a potential House floor vote Wednesday. The House Rules Committee is debating the legislation, which is expected to be amended before it makes it through the committee Wednesday. It’s not clear when that will happen.
