After a dizzying back and forth that involved House Republican leadership delaying, pulling and abruptly restarting a vote on the conference’s budget blueprint Tuesday evening, Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget resolution narrowly passed the House in a 217-215 vote.
The plan calls for extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, raising the debt ceiling and directs key House committees to identify $2 trillion in federal spending cuts, a massive chunk of which is expected to come from Medicaid. It’s a first step toward advancing key elements of Trump’s fiscal agenda — and a first test of Trump’s ability to force the Republican Party to get in line, even as his administration takes a sledgehammer to the separation of powers.
It was unclear whether Republican leadership had convinced enough holdouts to support the resolution until the final votes came in Tuesday night. President Trump reportedly made calls to a handful of members who were opposed to the measure Tuesday afternoon and evening. Some hardliners were concerned the proposed trillions in spending cuts didn’t go far enough, while some vulnerable Republicans expressed hearburn over the resolution’s proposed gutting of Medicaid.
But eventually almost all the possible holdouts fell in line.
Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Victoria Spartz (R-IN,) who earlier in the day told reporters they were “leaning no” and “no,” folded under pressure.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the sole Republican holdout.
What was supposed to be an approximately 25 minute voting process turned into more than 2 hours of back and forth on Tuesday night.
Members started walking on to the House floor at 6:15 p.m. ET as they were scheduled to vote on an unrelated bill for about 15 mins before moving on to the budget resolution. Fifteen minutes passed by and the bill overwhelmingly passed — based on the live tally — but the vote stayed open on the House floor for almost an additional hour.
Over that hour, Democrats on the floor shouted multiple times, calling for the vote to be closed so they could move on to the consideration of the budget resolution.
But House GOP leadership appeared to have other plans. According to TPM’s view of the House floor and other reports from the scene, leadership spent the hour the vote remained open actively speaking to several holdouts.
After some time, the budget vote was pulled from the schedule and members began exiting the floor en masse, leaving the impression that the efforts to whip the several holdouts had been unsuccessful. Moments later, members began returning to the floor again.
Several members told reporters as they reentered the chamber they got in their cars and drove away only to find out, just minutes later, that the budget resolution was back on the floor.
Democrats and Republicans alike started coming back to the floor — some joking about the back and forth, others clearly frustrated.
“I feel like I should walk in here and vote ‘no’ just to piss everybody off,” Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) jokingly said as he walked back onto the floor.
One Democrat — Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) insinuated the hiccup that made members leave and come back was on purpose.
“Do I think or do I know? Yes, absolutely,” Crockett told TPM when asked if she thought what happened was intentional.
While Crockett thought the confusing back and forth was on purpose, House DOGE Caucus Chair Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) disagreed. Bean told reporters that he thinks GOP leadership succeeded in convincing enough of the holdout to change the fate of the budget at the last minute.
Rep. Michael McCaul chimed in, saying he thinks President Trump helped flip some of the holdouts.
Johnson also made it clear Trump had a hand in the whipping process.
“The President has talked to a number of members,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “He’s made his intentions well known, and he wants them to vote for this.”
Meanwhile, Democrats stood united against the House Republican budget proposal during Tuesday’s vote.
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and a large group of House Democrats held an event on the House steps Tuesday afternoon ahead of the vote, rallying against the GOP blueprint and the Medicaid cuts they say Republicans are planning.
“Donald Trump, the administration and House Republicans are hurting the American people,” Jeffries said. “It’s unacceptable, unconscionable, un-American and we are not going to stand for it one minute.”
Jeffries described the potential cuts to Medicaid as a “betrayal of working class Americans.”
Locked out of power, Democrats can’t do much but rally around the leadership’s messaging priorities.
That reality was on full display Tuesday. During the debate leading up to the floor vote, Democrats countered every single Republican who spoke in favor of the budget proposal by publicly announcing how many people in that Republican lawmaker’s home state or district would be impacted by the cuts to Medicaid.
Source link