Conservative Republicans are threatening to sink Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill in the House as GOP leaders scramble to pass it before the 4th of July.
Republican leaders are in the final stretch to lock down the president’s megabill that tackles his domestic spending agenda, but it appeared to be stalled without a clear path forward Wednesday afternoon.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus were not on board with the version passed in the Senate on Tuesday and sent back to the House.
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The president was working the phones and meeting with House members in person at the White House on Wednesday.
Trump foe, Rep. Thomas Massie, suggested there are ten Republicans who are “no” on the bill, but it only takes four GOP “no” votes to sink it, as every single Democrat is expected to vote against it.
“There are probably 10 NO’s at the moment, but I don’t speak for them or vouch for them,” Massie wrote on X.
Gearing up for a key procedural vote, there were a number of Republican members huddling on the House floor and nearby as it remained unclear what Speaker Mike Johnson would do next.
The House even kept a vote open for more than two hours as Republican members scrambled to find a solution.
By mid-afternoon, it did not appear that a vote on the rules would be imminent as the conversations continued in another setback for Republicans looking to push forward quickly to meet the president’s holiday deadline.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris said on Wednesday that the rules vote would fail if Johnson brought it to the floor.
“Right now, what the president should be doing is calling the Senate back into town,” Harris told reporters.
He said it was pretty clear that the Senate was going to have to get involved with the bill one more time and blasted them for leaving town after their Tuesday vote.
Johnson told reporters they were working through everyone’s issues.
“We can’t make everyone 100 percent happy. It’s impossible. This is a deliberative body,” Johnson said.
The House Freedom Caucus was circulating a three-page memo criticizing the Senate-passed bill on Wednesday. It highlighted more than a dozen changes the Senate made from the House bill passed by just one vote in May.
Senate Republicans made many, but not all of their changes, to comply with the Senate rules governing reconciliation, which would allow them to pass their bill with a simple majority rather than needing sixty votes to avoid a filibuster.
The bill ended up passing in the Senate on Tuesday by 51 to 50, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
