The clock is ticking for Republicans to get their massive reconciliation bill across the finish line before their self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day. At the moment, Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t have the votes.
Key committees have worked overtime this week to mark up their respective parts of the reconciliation bill. And the House Budget Committee — the final panel from which the overall bill will be reported out of — plans to meet Friday morning to finalize the text. Republicans on the committee are expected to approve the legislation along party lines.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems ahead for GOP leaders.
A handful of Republicans are signaling opposition to the reconciliation measure, and concerningly for Johnson, the opposition is coming from different factions of the GOP conference. (Johnson can only lose three Republicans if everyone votes and all Democrats, as expected, reject the legislation.)
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“There’s a significant number who have very strong reservations,” Rep. Chip Roy told reporters Wednesday. “We didn’t come here to claim that we’re going to reform things and then not do it, right?”
Roy is one of the conservatives expressing dissatisfaction with the bill, a group that includes some of the most experienced naysayers in the GOP. They want additional Medicaid cuts and a quicker timeline on the existing reductions. (For instance, the work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients start in 2029 — after the next presidential election.)
“If it’s good enough in four years, why isn’t it good enough now?” Rep. Ralph Norman, a fellow Freedom Caucus member, said Wednesday.
But many conservatives are stopping short of saying they outright oppose the bill.
“Let me just say this, I’m trying to work through things,” Rep. Andy Biggs said.
When asked about his conversations with Republican leaders, Roy wouldn’t elaborate. He said Johnson was “always willing to sit down and talk.”
“And we’re having conversations with the White House and the speaker,” Roy said.
The problem is, Johnson is already holding together a fragile faction of moderates who are uncomfortable with some of the choices in the bill.
On top of about $700 billion in health care cuts, which would result in an additional 8.6 million people losing coverage — on top of another 5 million who are already expected to lose coverage in the coming years — there are about $300 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the reconciliation bill.
Democrats are already signaling that they’ll campaign on their GOP counterparts paying for tax cuts for the rich by going after low-income Americans on Medicaid. And some of the tax policies in the bill are adding to the narrative that Republicans are targeting the poorest Americans.
The only income bracket which loses in the tax portion of the bill is those making less than $15,000 a year. Those people can expect to effectively pay about 1% more in taxes, compared to all other income brackets, which receive about a 2% or 3% cut, according to a distribution analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation. (That cut is mostly an extension of the current tax rates, which expire at the end of the year, meaning the people who would mostly be affected by the bill are those who stand to lose Medicaid coverage.)
At the moment, however, it’s a much different tax problem that’s giving Johnson problems.
A collection of Republicans from states like New York, New Jersey and California have refused to get onboard with the reconciliation bill over the state and local tax deduction.
As the legislation currently stands, Republicans are tripling the deduction, from $10,000 to $30,000, allowing wealthy homeowners to write off the property taxes they pay locally on their federal tax bill. But these Republicans in the “SALT caucus” are holding out for a better deal.
“This should have been dealt with months ago,” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told NOTUS. “We were all very willing to negotiate.”
Lawler told NOTUS that “as this currently stands, I don’t see how it gets the votes.”
But the answer to that question is the same one that has brought Republicans together repeatedly on tough votes this year: Donald Trump.
Republican leaders are counting on the president to get this bill over the line. And many Republicans — even the ones who aren’t ecstatic with the bill — know Trump is the key to passage.
“The only way we’re going to get on track with it is with Trump,” Rep. Tim Burchett said.
Burchett is one of those Republicans expressing discomfort with the legislation. But he’s also one of the Republicans who has repeatedly gotten in line when Trump has asked him to — most recently for supporting the budget framework.
House Republicans are set to hold a conference-wide meeting Thursday afternoon in the hopes of allowing rank-and-file members to air out their grievances. But things are already moving quickly. Once the Budget Committee reports the legislation to the floor, the Rules Committee is expected to meet early next week to set up debate and a final vote on the bill before lawmakers leave next week for a Memorial Day break.
Of course, even if this legislation gets out of the House, Republicans don’t think this one will be their last. Many GOP lawmakers expect the Senate to significantly modify the bill and tamp down some of the conservative policies cutting Medicaid and food benefits.
“We’re going through all this shit and it’ll come out like corn through a goose over in the Senate,” one GOP lawmaker told NOTUS. “It’s all going to change.”
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Daniella Diaz is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.
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