House Republicans’ mammoth budget resolution survived its final hurdle late Monday night before heading for a chamber-wide vote.
The legislation passed the House Rules Committee on a party-line vote in a measure combining several bills that are expected to get a full House vote this week.
House GOP leaders aim to have it pass on Tuesday evening, Fox News Digital was told, but various concerns about spending cut levels could put that goal out of reach. Under the current margins, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., can only lose one Republican vote to pass a bill without Democrats.
Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., announced over the weekend that she is against the current text, while several other fiscal hawks suggested their support is still up in the air.
Two other conservatives, Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., signaled they would oppose the resolution as well.
Some Republicans are worried about potentially damaging cuts to Medicaid and other federal benefit programs that their constituents rely on. Johnson met with some of those potential holdouts on Monday night for what he called a ‘very productive conversation.’
The speaker sounded optimistic when leaving the Capitol late on Monday, telling reporters, ‘We’re on track. We got the resolution through rules, and we’re expecting to vote tomorrow evening.’
The bill aims to increase spending on border security, the judiciary and defense by roughly $300 billion, while seeking at least $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts elsewhere.
As written, the bill also provides $4.5 trillion to extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions, which expire at the end of this year.
An amendment negotiated by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, and conservatives on his panel would also force lawmakers to make $2 trillion in cuts, or else risk the $4.5 trillion for Trump’s tax cuts getting reduced by the difference.
That agreement alarmed Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee, like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y.
‘I don’t think that is doable without affecting beneficiaries, and I’ve expressed that concern to leadership and in talking to some of my colleagues,’ Malliotakis told Fox News Digital last week.
Johnson met with Malliotakis and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, a House GOP group, on Monday night to discuss their concerns about spending cuts in the bill. The New York Republican was more optimistic when leaving the meeting late on Monday night, telling reporters that GOP leaders had eased her concerns.
‘I’d say now I’ve shifted from undecided to lean yes,’ Malliotakis told reporters. ‘This is moving in the right direction.’
GOP lawmakers are working to pass a broad swath of Trump policies – from investments in defense and border security to eliminating taxes on tipped and overtime wages – via the budget reconciliation process.
The mechanism allows the party in control of both houses of Congress to pass a tax and budget bill without help from the opposing party. To do so, it lowers the threshold for passage in the Senate from two-thirds to a simple majority, where the House already sits.
The Senate advanced a narrower version of the plan last week, which does not include Trump’s tax cut priorities. Because the president favors all the issues being wrapped up into one bill, however, it has been relegated to a de facto backup plan if the House fails to pass its plan on a reasonable timeline.
The House Rules Committee is the final gatekeeper for most pieces of legislation before a chamber-wide vote.
The committee will normally debate a set of bills, not necessarily related ones, before setting terms for amendments and debate and advancing those terms out of committee as a single ‘rules package.’
House lawmakers will then vote on the rules package before the final reconciliation framework.
Once this bill passes the House, the relevant committees will get to work filling the framework out with detailed policy priorities, which will then be returned as a final bill that will need to face House passage again.
Johnson said at the Americans for Prosperity event on Monday that he wants that to happen sometime in April.