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Donald Trump made an appearance on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as lawmakers in the House Republican caucus continue to bicker over the fate of their budget reconciliation package.
A late-night vote is tee’d up to take place in the early hours of Wednesday morning in front of the House Rules Committee, the last step before the bill will likely reach the House floor later in the day. Speaker Mike Johnson wants a final vote on the package on Wednesday.
The certainties end there. While GOP holdouts indicated on Tuesday that they’d likely allow the bill to advance in committee, its fate on the House floor remains an entirely uncertain prospect.
Holdouts remain on two separate wings of the Republican caucus — the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, and the center-right SALT caucus, which is largely made up of Republicans in blue states. The latter includes Republicans in some of the most vulnerable positions, who stand to potentially lose their seats in next year’s midterms should a voter backlash occur.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday afternoon that a vote would take place by the end of Thursday at the latest.
“We’re still finalizing things, but it’s not going to be a heavy lift,” Johnson said, according to The Hill. “We’ve got a number of loose ends to tie up, but they’re coming together well.”
“This is a 1,100-page piece of legislation, [and] we’re down to a few provisions,” the speaker continued. “So we are very confident, very optimistic we get this done.”
Trump, in the morning, urged both sides to come together at a closed-door meeting with the entire GOP caucus. To the SALT caucus’s Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, Trump implored: “End it, Mike, just end it.”
“I know your district better than you do. If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway,” he reportedly added, according to Punchbowl News.
And to the conservatives hoping for steeper cuts to Medicaid with the aim of lowering the deficit, Trump warned plainly: “Don’t f*ck around with Medicaid.”
But this may mark the first time that the 47th president’s older sibling-esque backing up of Mike Johnson fails to win over sufficient GOP support for the speaker to pass a bill through his divided caucus.
Lawler was unmoved after the meeting, as was expected “no” vote Thomas Massie, despite being ripped as a “grandstander” by the president at a press conference. Andy Harris, head of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters late in the afternoon that progress had been made, but that he was still opposed to the package as well.
The ideological spread of the holdouts suggests that Johnson has more than a day’s worth of work ahead of him to win over both sides — if that is even possible. But there were clear signs Tuesday evening that the speaker was inching closer to his goal.
Johnson met with members of the SALT caucus again early Tuesday evening, and a deal addressing state and local tax (SALT) deductions appeared to be on the table. The cap for those deductions was set at $10,000 in the 2017 Republican tax bill — SALT caucus members want to push it higher, and as of Tuesday evening, were discussing an offer from Johnson of raising it to $40,000, according to reports.
Nicole Maliotakis, a member of the SALT caucus, urged her colleagues to take the deal that was offered.
“They should fight as hard as they can, to the bitter end, but the end is very near,” Maliotakis told The Independent. “We need to just get the bill across the finish line. Accept the best [offer], you know, fight for as much as you can, but then when it's the best offer, it's the best offer. And we need to move forward and just get the job done.”
There’s no sign yet of whether hardline conservatives like Roy will accept that offer.
“We're in a better spot than we were a week ago. We're in a better spot than we were even 48 hours ago, but there's still a lot of things we're hammering out,” Roy told reporters Tuesday evening outside the Capitol.
Responding to a question from The Independent about the 1:00 a.m. vote timing, the congressman added: “I don't think that's the right way to do business.”
Democrats, unable to tank the bill through sheer numbers on their own, have gone on the offensive over proposed changes to Medicaid in the Republican bill. Under the legislation, Americans on the program would face new work requirements (barring age or disability), while the program would also increase the frequency of eligibility checks. Critics say the changes would throw millions off their healthcare plans due to an increase in bureaucratic red tape, which can be difficult for many to navigate.
Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules panel, derided his GOP counterparts for the committee’s vote timing.
“The question is, why one in the morning? I mean, what are they afraid of? ‘What are they ashamed of?’ is probably the better question,” said McGovern on Tuesday.
“I think they just don't want people to know what they're doing,” said McGovern. “They're throwing millions of people off of healthcare, essential food assistance, all to pay for a tax cut for billionaires. I mean, this is a shitty way to legislate.”
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