Washington — President Trump met Tuesday with House Republicans as leaders try to push a massive budget package containing the president’s legislative priorities over its last hurdle before it can get to the floor.
The president put pressure on members to fall in line as the party’s dueling factions have threatened to upend the plan as they set down apparent red lines that don’t align with the demands made from other members. When he arrived on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump suggested that any Republican who doesn’t back what he refers to as the “big, beautiful bill” would be “knocked out so fast,” citing a handful of “grandstanders.”
“It’s the biggest bill ever passed, and we’ve got to get it done,” Mr. Trump said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, can only afford three defections in a floor vote, if all members are present and voting, given his slim majority. All Democrats are expected to oppose it.
“I would say that if the vote were held right now, it dies a painful death,” said Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, who said he would vote “no” on the package in its current form.
But before a floor vote, the legislation will have to make it through the Rules Committee, the last stop for most legislation before the full House votes on a measure. The committee began meeting shortly after 1 a.m. Wednesday.
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In a promising sign, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the conservative holdouts who stalled the bill in the Budget Committee, said he would allow it to advance out of the Rules Committee, where he is also a member.
“I’m not going to kill it in Rules,” Norman told reporters Monday night. “It needs to go to the floor.”
When asked after the meeting with Mr. Trump on Tuesday whether he would support the bill on the House floor, Norman said “we’ll see.”
The committee’s rare late-night meeting comes as Republican leadership races to pass the budget package before their self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.
Johnson has been meeting with the different factions in recent days to hear the demands and build a consensus around a modified version of the legislation that was produced by nearly a dozen House committees.
Conservatives, who are upset that that bill does not make steep enough spending cuts to significantly bring down the deficit, have pushed for Medicaid work requirements to kick in much sooner than a 2029 deadline. They also want to eliminate all the clean energy subsidies that were implemented under the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by former President Joe Biden.
“It is unfortunately front-loaded in deficits and backloaded in savings, which I do not like,” Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, another conservative holdout, said Monday. “None of my votes are guaranteed at this point.”
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the original version of the bill would add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.
Conservatives have also been pushing to change the rate by which the federal government pays states for Medicaid, a point of contention with moderates, who have warned against larger cuts to the program.
Johnson reiterated Monday that the change has “been off the table for quite some time.” And Mr. Trump said ahead of the meeting Tuesday morning that “we’re not doing anything cutting of anything meaningful,” adding that on Medicaid, “the only thing we’re cutting is waste, fraud and abuse.”
A provision on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, is facing pushback from a group of Republicans from blue states, who have threatened to withhold their votes unless their demands are met.
GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York outlined ahead of the meeting that the group of moderates had no plans to cave. And on his message to conservatives, Lawler told reporters, “if they think we’re going to throw our constituents under the bus to appease them, it’s not happening.”
“The fact is, we wouldn’t even be in this position right now if you didn’t have members in seats like mine who won,” Lawler said.
Mr. Trump also weighed in on the SALT issue, suggesting that he opposes raising the cap because he claimed Democratic governors from states like New York, Illinois and California would benefit, calling them the “biggest” beneficiaries.
According to a senior White House official, Mr. Trump told the House GOP conference during the meeting that they should not let division over the SALT cap get in the way of the bill, and said they should not touch Medicaid, except for addressing waste, fraud and abuse, along with cutting benefits for noncitizens and imposing work requirements. The official said Mr. Trump also made clear he wants every Republican to vote “yes” on the bill, while saying he’s losing patience with the remaining holdouts.
Johnson said at a news conference following the meeting that leadership would now work to “gather up the small subgroups in the House Republican conference and tie up the remaining loose ends.”
“We are going to get this done,” the speaker added.
Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said Mr. Trump was “emphatic we need to quit screwing around” on the budget package. He said 98% of the conference is “ready to go,” and was “pumped up” by the president, while noting that “he did move” the holdouts.
“I don’t know that we are there yet, but that was a hugely impactful meeting,” Johnson said.
When the meeting let out after nearly two hours Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters “that was a meeting of love.”
contributed to this report.
