Moments after a divided Senate was able to overcome a small Republican rebellion and pass President Trump’s marquee domestic policy bill, all eyes turned to the House where Republican leaders must now contend with growing opposition within their ranks that could derail plans to deliver the legislation to Mr. Trump by Friday.
Speaker Mike Johnson was able to win over reluctant Republicans in May by offering a range of concessions to bring House members in line to pass its version of the reconciliation package. But since the Senate made significant changes, he must again stamp out intraparty rebellion without making changes that would require it to go back to the Senate.
The path is steep: Multiple members who voted to pass the House version criticized what emerged from the upper chamber, and Mr. Johnson can lose fewer than a handful if all members vote. When the House first voted on the measure in late May, two Republicans, Representatives Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — both anti-deficit conservatives — joined all Democrats in voting against it.
“The changes the Senate made to the House-passed Beautiful Bill, including unacceptable increases to the national debt and the deficit, are going to make passage in the House difficult,” Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, wrote Tuesday in a social media post.
He did not say whether the changes would affect his vote, but he did express a willingness to do away with the arbitrary July 4 deadline set by Mr. Trump to seek improvements to the bill. “We cannot in good faith pass a bill through our chamber that hinges on cut corners and earmarks,” Mr. Stutzman wrote. “The American people won’t stand for it.”
Other members of his party were less circumspect.
“No,” Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, repeated when reporters asked if he would vote for the bill as he did before.
“No,” he said again when asked if he would cast a procedural vote to allow the bill to make it to the floor.
“What we ought to do is take exactly the House bill that we sent over and go home and say ‘when you’re serious, come back,’” he added, before entering the committee room where House deliberations on the bill began shortly after it passed the Senate.
There were other immediate signs the Senate-passed bill had a tough path ahead.
Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee called it a “dud” that “guts key Trump provisions.” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said the Senate’s treatment of clean energy tax credits were not aggressive enough and called it “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”
More moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans repeated their opposition to its cuts to Medicaid.
“I’ve been clear from the start that I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid,” Representative David Valadao, Republican of California, said in a social media post over the weekend. He argued that the version passed by the House made “reasonable” changes to the program but warned that his support would be lost if deeper cuts were made in the Senate.
Senate Republicans did just that, planning to help offset tax cuts and new spending with steeper cuts to Medicaid, tens of billions of dollars more than the House plan.
Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, predicted that there was enough opposition to delay passage by the end of the week and predicted that the two chambers would trade modifications before the bill would be ready for Mr. Trump’s signature.
“The bottom line is this is not ready for prime time. We support the president’s agenda. The president’s agenda was not to raise the deficit by three-quarters of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years,” Mr. Harris, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview on Fox News. “The bottom line is the House will have its say, and this will not sail through the House. We’re going to have to negotiate with the Senate one more time.”
The groundswell of opposition among House Republicans was familiar. When they first passed their version of the reconciliation package in late May, a number of Republicans publicly opposed the bill, but, after lengthy deal-making sessions and some concessions from party leaders, most critics caved.
As was the case in the Senate, Republicans in the House can afford only three defections, if all members are voting and present. The immovable Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has already vowed to vote against it again.
Last time around, Mr. Trump was actively engaged to whip votes in favor, calling individual House members and traveling to Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, he renewed calls for his party to deliver results by his July 4 deadline.
“We can have all of this right now, but only if the House GOP UNITES, ignores its occasional ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ (You know who you are!), and does the right thing, which is sending this Bill to my desk,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media account Tuesday afternoon.
Representative Warren Davidson, the Ohio Republican who voted against the House version in May, signaled that his concerns over spending had not been soothed after seeing changes made to the bill in the Senate.
“Promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending,” Mr. Davidson said in a social media post on Tuesday. “We will eventually arrive at the crash site, because it appears nothing will stop this runaway spending train. A fatal overdose of government.”
Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.
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