Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, has said the Senate failed to improve a House bill that he described as a “mediocre but passable product.”
Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Will House Conservatives Cave Again on Trump’s Big Bill?

Fiscal hawks have repeatedly threatened to bring down their party’s agenda out of debt fears, only to back down after pressure from party leaders and President Trump.

by · NY Times

It is, by now, a well-worn routine.

Spending hawks in the House declare their irrevocable opposition to the fiscal legislation G.O.P. leaders are advancing. They savage it for days as irresponsible and insupportable, condemning its impact on the already soaring federal debt. Suspense builds: Will this be the time they defy their leaders and President Trump and vote no?

Then, after meetings and calls with Mr. Trump and much arm-twisting on the House floor, they cave.

House Republican leaders hoped on Wednesday that that pattern would hold as they raced to pass their party’s behemoth bill to slash taxes and social safety net programs. A refusal to relent could cause Congress to careen past Mr. Trump’s deadline for enacting the bill and derail the legislation that Republicans have toiled for months on to deliver the president’s domestic agenda.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus declared on Wednesday that this time they were dug in, and spent the day meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson at the Capitol, demanding major changes to the legislation the Senate passed on Tuesday.

There is a lot in that bill for them to despise. To win the support needed to pass it, Senate G.O.P. leaders added at least another $1 trillion in spending, including a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals to help health care providers absorb the impact of the Medicaid cuts the bill would impose.

It would blunt conservatives’ bid to immediately end clean energy programs created by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Companies building wind and solar projects could still claim a lucrative tax credit as long as they either began construction within a year of the law’s enactment or put them into service before the end of 2027.

At the behest of the Senate parliamentarian, they struck a provision approved by the House that would bar Medicaid from covering any gender-affirming care for transgender patients. They also eliminated a provision that restricted “Trump Accounts” — $1,000 tax-advantaged investment accounts created by the bill for every baby born in the country — only to the children of U.S. citizens.

And crucially, for the House Republicans who had demanded that the bill not add to deficits, it would add at least $3.3 trillion to the federal debt.

“We need to ensure good policy isn’t poisoned by bad spending,” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina said.

A “dud,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee said of the bill.

Representative Chip Roy of Texas made a series of angry posts on social media, saying the bill “increases deficits and violates the terms of the budget deal in the House.” The Senate’s treatment of clean energy tax credits, he said, were “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”

Mr. Roy has railed against his party’s efforts to put together the domestic policy legislation for months. His complaints have been unrelenting, even after he voted for both the House budget blueprint and the bill itself.

“The math isn’t mathing” has been his refrain.

Mr. Roy said he ultimately voted for the House version of the bill in part because Mr. Johnson had agreed to accelerate proposed Medicaid work requirements from a 2029 start to 2026. At the time, he said the bill still “needs massive improvements if we are to make a dent in our deficit or to change the trajectory of this country.”

Now, months later, Mr. Roy is making the case the Senate failed to improve what he described as the “mediocre but passable product” he supported.

“Instead of improving it,” he wrote on social media, Senate Republicans were making the bill worse and “blaming the parliamentarian.”

Still, some Republicans who want to pass the legislation see reason for hope. Representative Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican who supports the legislation and attended a group meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House on Wednesday, said the president was able to sway some holdouts.

“The president is the best closer in the business, and he got a lot of members to yes in that meeting,” Mr. Johnson said after he returned to the Capitol.

Mr. Trump has a remarkable track record in tamping down such revolts.

In January, Representatives Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas resigned themselves to voting for Mr. Johnson as speaker after speaking to Mr. Trump on the phone just off the House floor as G.O.P. leaders held the vote open.

In March, all but one conservative in the House G.O.P. conference voted for a stopgap bill that essentially kept intact the spending levels under Mr. Biden. They argued that the stopgap bill gave Mr. Trump latitude to continue his campaign to dismantle and defund major pieces of the federal government.

When it came time in February to pass the blueprint setting the spending levels for Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill, it appeared the vote was set to fail — until the president called the holdouts, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Victoria Spartz of Indiana. Minutes after ending the calls, they cast their votes in favor of the plan.

In April, when House Republicans had to pass an amended version of the blueprint, Mr. Johnson was forced to delay a planned vote on the measure after he spent more than an hour huddled with conservative holdouts. They relented the next day, after receiving assurances from Mr. Trump and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, that the final version of the legislation would contain deep spending cuts.

The last time fiscal conservatives followed through with their threats to defeat their party’s legislation on the floor was in December, when they killed a stopgap spending bill endorsed by Mr. Trump to avert a shutdown that had become laden with other measures and carried a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit.

The major difference in that scenario: Mr. Trump was not yet president.

Robert Jimison contributed reporting.

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