House GOP holdouts force delay on vote to advance Trump's legislative agenda
WASHINGTON – Around a dozen GOP holdouts are refusing to advance a blueprint for President Donald Trump's legislative agenda, forcing House leadership to delay a planned vote Wednesday.
The lawmakers are concerned that the blueprint will result in a legislative package that will not offset spending with enough cuts, exacerbating the already-ballooning federal deficit.
"This is part of the process, this is a very constructive process," House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Wednesday night, emerging from a room off the House chamber where he had been meeting with the holdouts for more than an hour.
"We want everybody to have a high degree of comfort about what is happening here, and we have a small subset of members who weren't totally satisfied with the product."
Johnson said he spoke on the phone with Trump but did not put the members on the phone directly with the president, as he has in the past to corral members who plan to vote against him.
"He understands it, he supports the process," Johnson said of Trump. "He wants us to do this right and do it well. And sometimes it takes a little bit more time to do that."
Johnson added that lawmakers will now likely vote on the resolution Thursday morning. He suggested there are a few options, including calling a formal meeting with the Senate to work out the kinks, or passing an amendment – which would require the Senate to vote again on the proposal, something Senate Majority Leader John Thune has already panned.
The resolution, once approved, will be the blueprint for a massive bill that Republicans hope to pass through a process known as "reconciliation" that avoids the supermajority requirement to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. That would allow the measure to pass both houses of Congress on with only Republican votes.
The package will eventually include Trump's priorities for border security, domestic energy production and taxes and, if passed, will be the marquee law of his second term as president.
But the blueprint instructs the House and Senate to craft separate proposals that will eventually need to be reconciled – and the Senate's instructions would require lawmakers to find very little spending cuts while implementing the president's expensive tax proposals.
"I think that the Senate didn't do Trump any favors. I think that they're setting him up, and us up, to screw us in the end and not cut any spending whatsoever," Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told Paste BN Wednesday on why he planned to vote against the resolution. "We need to put guardrails in place to make sure there's at least a minimum level of spending cuts."
Burlison and around a dozen other skeptical Republican House members said they couldn't get on board with the Senate's plan, despite several of them meeting with Thune and with Johnson ahead of the planned vote.
While Trump did not speak directly to Republican members Wednesday, he had publicly urged them to support the bill. He wrote on Truth Social Wednesday that is is "more important now, than ever, that we pass THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL," and on Tuesday night, he told House Republicans at a fundraiser: "Close your eyes and get there."
Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., was another one of the lawmakers meeting with Johnson Wednesday night. As he left the Capitol, he expressed confidence that they'd find a solution that works for everybody before the week was over: "I think we'll have a more conservative alternative tomorrow."