WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders moved 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.
But after a day of meetings, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was still struggling Wednesday night to lock down the votes he needed. A procedural “rule” vote to move on to final passage of the bill was stalled as Johnson and his leadership team tried to win over the party’s skeptics, who included conservative and moderate members. He can afford only three GOP defections to pass the legislation through his narrow majority, with all Democrats opposed to it.
“We’re in a good place right now; this is the legislative process,” Johnson said before the rule vote. “This is exactly how I think the framers intended for it to work. We feel very good about where we are, and we’re moving forward.”
Trump, who held meetings with and made phone calls to the party’s holdouts throughout the day, sought to ramp up the pressure with a post-midnight Truth Social post.
“What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” he wrote.
Earlier Wednesday, GOP leaders kept a separate procedural vote open for more than seven hours — a record in the House — and sent lawmakers back to their offices as talks continued.
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The House was scheduled to be on recess this week, but Johnson called members back to Washington to vote on the bill and meet Trump’s imposed July 4 deadline for passage. Trump can sign it into law after the House passes it.
On Wednesday morning, 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 hosting multiple meetings with holdouts and on-the-fence members, including members of the Freedom Caucus and the center-right Republican Main Street Caucus and Republican Governance Group.
Later Wednesday, Freedom Caucus members and their allies gathered behind closed doors at the Capitol to discuss what they had heard from Trump. And there were indications the holdouts were beginning to soften their opposition.
“I always hear these reports about [Trump] raising his voice and cussing people, and it was nothing like that,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., one of the conservative holdouts. “I wouldn’t mind if my daughter had been in the room with us.”
Another holdout, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., called it a “good meeting” with Trump and said they “found out a lot of new information.”
And Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, who was one of two Republicans to vote against the House’s original version of the “big, beautiful bill” in May, said Wednesday he would support the revised version.
Within hours of its narrowly passing the Senate on Tuesday, House Republicans advanced the bill through the Rules Committee in a 7-6 vote, with Norman and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, voting “no” because of concerns that it would add to the debt.
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 make significant cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and clean energy funding while raising the debt limit by $5 trillion.
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.
Several House conservatives complained that the spending cuts were insufficient after the shrinking in the Senate package. They raged against the fact that various provisions were stripped out because of budget rules in the Senate, including immigration-related restrictions they strongly support.
Freedom Caucus leaders circulated a document Wednesday trashing the Senate bill for increasing the deficit and not going far enough on clean energy and Medicaid, among other grievances relative to the House-passed bill.
But many of the House Republican holdouts have developed track records 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 said conservatives in the Freedom Caucus used to get political cover from groups like the Club for Growth but that Trump has scrambled the calculus on the right. The Club for Growth is backing the bill, and conservative figures in Trump’s inner circle, like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, are 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 Massie, a conservative 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 railed against the legislation and said it would make the deficit worse.
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.
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 Energy and Commerce Committee, who has been in the House since 1988.
