The House Rules Committee convened just after 1 a.m. on Wednesday morning, with hundreds of amendments to be debated on the “one big, beautiful” reconciliation bill.
But they were missing the most essential amendment of all, one that would encompass all the changes House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to factions of his conference in an effort to get holdouts on board with reconciliation.
The manager’s amendment is a catch-all for the changes being negotiated by Johnson with holdouts behind closed doors. Republicans didn’t have this amendment when they entered the middle-of-the-night committee meeting, and still did not have it many hours later, as they still were negotiating details well into the morning.
In the room, as chairs and ranking members of various committees spoke on the bill and answered committee members’ questions, almost every Republican wasn’t there. Significantly, bill skeptics Reps. Chip Roy and Ralph Norman were elsewhere continuing to negotiate the details.
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“You called this meeting, and I can’t help but notice who’s not here. There’s four of us and three of you,” Democratic Ranking Member Jim McGovern said at 3:06 a.m. “Being in the next room is not being here.”
Johnson also made an appearance in the early morning, popping into the same side room where Republicans met just before the meeting began.
He told reporters the manager’s amendment would be out “very, very soon.” Yet hours later, members were still waiting on the text.
It was clear before the committee meeting had begun that Republican leadership had the votes in the Rules Committee to move the bill to the floor. Norman, while potentially a holdout on the floor, committed on Tuesday afternoon to advancing the bill out of committee. Roy was coy, telling reporters to “stay up and find out” how he’d vote. Yet even if he votes no, it wouldn’t make a difference — it takes three GOP defections to tank the bill in the committee room.
So the suspense of the night was not whether Rules would send the bill out of committee, it was a matter of when everyone could actually see the changes being hammered out behind closed doors.
Republican leadership did, however, clear one major hurdle ahead of the meeting. Blue-state Republicans reached a tentative agreement with GOP leadership over the state and local tax deduction. The deal now on the table is a $40,000 cap for people making under $500,000 a year, with a year-by-year growth of the dedication over the next decade.
That’s a $10,000 increase from the cap initially proposed by leadership that a group in the SALT caucus called a nonstarter.
Another update Democrats have capitalized on is new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, published Tuesday night mere hours ahead of the meeting. The CBO cost estimate found that tax provisions in the bill would help the top 10% and hurt the bottom 10% of Americans.
A final vote is expected around mid-morning or later, depending on the timing of the manager’s amendment. As of 5:45 a.m., members have submitted 528 amendments. Twenty-two are from Republicans, the rest from Democrats.
“We have a lot of people who want amendments, there are a lot of people who want to speak,” Democratic Rules member Teresa Leger-Fernandez told NOTUS ahead of the meeting. “So hopefully they’ll be true to their word and let us present all of our amendments.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Shifra Dayak, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.
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