Republicans in Congress pledged Thursday to press ahead on advancing US President Donald Trump’s tax agenda after being forced by hardline conservatives to cancel a vote on their budget plan.
House Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the plug on Wednesday’s vote as it became clear that he did not have the support to get the Senate-passed blueprint through the House of Representatives.
Both chambers need to pass identical versions of the plan — which sets targets for overall spending — before work can begin on ushering into law a $5 trillion extension of Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts.
The sticking point is the difference between $4 billion spending cuts outlined in the Senate-passed resolution and much deeper $1.5 trillion reductions the House wants to see.
But Republican leaders were bullish that they could still muscle the Senate plan through the razor-thin 220-213 House majority in a vote planned for Thursday morning after fraught negotiations with the rebels.
“I’m happy to tell you that this morning, I believe we had the votes to finally adopt the budget resolution so we can move forward on President Trump’s very important agenda for the American people,” Johnson told reporters in a briefing at the Capitol.
The speaker, who can only afford to lose three of his members when all lawmakers are present and voting, is banking on this public commitment flipping some of the fiscal hawks on his back benches.
Bloody nose
Wednesday’s setback delivered a bloody nose for both Republican leadership and Trump — exposing weaknesses in the president’s iron grip on the party and raising doubts over its ability to coalesce around his agenda.
Trump hosted holdouts at the White House, other administration officials worked the phones and Senate Republican leader John Thune met with the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus.
Johnson circulated on the House floor, huddling with the holdouts as an unrelated vote was held open for more than an hour.
House Republicans have set a deadline of getting the budget to Trump’s desk before the two-week spring recess, which begins on Friday.
Members of the upper chamber say their $4 billion savings figure is only a baseline and the real cuts will be much larger.
But House conservatives have voiced suspicions that the Senate will fail to honor that commitment after the blueprint passes.
Senate Republicans tend to be more moderate than their House counterparts and are wary of the deep cuts to Medicaid — the federal health program for low income families — that would be needed to match the House’s savings ambitions.
“The speaker has talked about $1.5 trillion,” Thune told reporters, as he addressed the doubts in the House.
“We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum, and we’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter.”
Democrats oppose the budget, which they say is part of long-held Republican plans to drastically rein in the federal bureaucracy.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the budget resolution would pave the way for “the largest Medicaid cut in American history in order to pass massive tax breaks for… billionaire donors.”
