Representative Tim Burchett is fond of saying no.
The fourth-term Tennessean was one of the eight renegade Republicans who helped oust Kevin McCarthy, and when Speaker Mike Johnson tries to rally the party around legislation, many times Burchett is one of the last holdouts. As Burchett left the Capitol on Monday, he complained to me: “It’s always the conservatives that have to compromise.”
He doesn’t want to compromise on President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the economic proposal that is pitting the party’s hard-line right wing (that’s Burchett) against members who could lose their seat by supporting legislation to extend a windfall for the wealthy while reducing benefits for those at the bottom of the income scale. Burchett is frustrated that the bill adds trillions to the nation’s debt and does not slash enough spending. He warned GOP leaders not to “poke the bear” by once again caving to more moderate Republicans. “At some point,” Burchett told me, “the conservatives are going to push back, and it’s going to shut the whole thing down.”
But can he say that to the president? Can he tell Trump no?
“I don’t know,” Burchett replied.
In that, he’s not alone. Republicans have mounted remarkably little resistance to Trump early in his second term. They’ve allowed him to bypass Congress and essentially shut down federal agencies on his own. The Senate has confirmed nearly all of his Cabinet nominees, even those who were accused of sexual misconduct or who had no obvious qualifications for their job. Time and again, GOP lawmakers have rebelled against Johnson only to fold under pressure from Trump.
With that in mind, the speaker brought in the president yesterday morning to make what he hoped would be a final pitch to Republicans: Set aside your differences and pass the bill onto the Senate. The time for bickering is over. Take the deal. Get. It. Done. It was a bit like a baseball manager summoning his closer in the seventh inning. Although Johnson wanted to hold a vote this week, a final agreement did not appear to be within reach nearly that quickly. “They think this is the close. I’m just going to politely disagree,” Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus and a critic of the current bill, told me.
Passing Trump’s plan through the House is just one hurdle Republicans have to clear. The Senate is likely to make its own changes to the bill, which the House would then have to accept. GOP leaders want to increase the nation’s debt limit as part of the measure, and Congress must do that by the summer to avoid a catastrophic default.
In the House, Republicans are squeezing the speaker from both the right and the left. Conservatives such as Burchett are pressing for bigger changes to Medicaid and a faster repeal of clean-energy tax credits enacted by former President Joe Biden. But some swing-district Republicans are worried those cuts will hurt their constituents and jeopardize their reelection bids. Polls show that cuts to Medicaid are deeply unpopular, and as it stands, the bill could result in as many as 10 million Americans losing health insurance, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found. Another faction representing New York and California is insisting that the bill allow people a much more generous deduction for state and local taxes, a provision known as SALT.
Democrats have assailed the bill as a fiscal and moral atrocity, arguing that the proposal cuts programs that provide aid to poor people while bestowing most of its benefits on the rich. “This is Robin Hood in reverse,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared yesterday on the House floor. With Democrats united in opposition, Johnson can likely afford no more than three defections from Republicans, and a far higher number of lawmakers has yet to be appeased.
By Trump’s telling, yesterday morning’s closed-door confab was “a meeting of love.” But behind those doors, Trump tried to put an end to negotiations and shut down demands. Any Republican who dared to vote against the bill would be “a fool,” he declared. The president reportedly told Republicans, “Don’t fuck around with Medicaid” by drastically cutting the program; he also dismissed calls for a bigger SALT deduction. (In fact, the legislation does mess with Medicaid by instituting work requirements for non-disabled adults, and it nearly triples the amount of state and local taxes that people can write off from their federal IRS bill.)
Despite the president’s plea, some of the holdouts said they were still holding out. “Nothing has changed,” Representative Keith Self of Texas, a conservative critic who wants deeper Medicaid cuts, told me. On the right, Harris and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky told reporters they were still opposed to the legislation. So, too, did three of the most vocal advocates of boosting the SALT deduction: Representatives Andrew Garbarino, Mike Lawler, and Nick LaLota, all of New York. “We need a little more SALT on the table to get to yes,” the Long Islander LaLota told reporters, his pun very much intended.
Conservatives have been venting about the bill for weeks. They’re annoyed that the proposal is heavy on tax cuts and much lighter on the spending reductions that Republicans campaign on but rarely enact. “There’s not an economist worth their salt that will tell you that what we’re doing is responsible or sustainable,” Representative Eli Crane of Arizona told me. (His pun did not seem intended.) “I’ve been one of the guys up here that doesn’t feel that the bill even goes far enough.” Before Trump’s visit, Burchett grumbled about “the so-called moderate or liberal members of the party,” saying they have been “fighting us every step of the way.”
But betting against the bill’s passage could be a mistake. Republicans are virtually unanimous in their belief that allowing Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to expire at year’s end—which would result in a tax hike for most Americans—would be worse than passing a flawed, deficit-busting bill. The House’s far-right faction, traditionally the chamber’s most recalcitrant, is now most closely aligned with Trump. The president’s demands of loyalty and heavy-handed treatment of dissenters have chastened if not defanged conservatives. A direct call from the president tends to be enough to flip a wavering Republican.
Burchett was in a considerably brighter mood after Trump’s pep talk. “He got me closer,” he told me. He did not repeat his gripes about the treatment of conservatives, or his warning that they might tank the bill. A personal plea from the president didn’t seem necessary. “He’s going to give us some food for thought,” Burchett said. “We’re moving right along with it.”
I asked a handful of other conservative holdouts this week what they would tell Trump if he personally asked them to vote for a bill that didn’t meet their demands. Not one said they would flatly tell him no. “I would look forward to chatting with the president,” Self said. “It’s always an honor.” Harris told me he would “make the case that this big, beautiful bill could get more beautiful with a little more work.” Representative Chip Roy of Texas, among the bill’s most vocal conservative critics, was evasive. “I’m not going to get into that,” he told me. “I’m not going to negotiate this through you.”
The hard-liners got more face time with the president this afternoon after talks with House leaders failed to move them, prompting Trump to bring members of the House Freedom Caucus to the White House. His aides released a statement in support of the bill, saying that failure to pass Trump’s plan would represent “the ultimate betrayal” of the president. Following the White House meeting, Johnson told reporters that he was moving forward with a vote. It wasn’t clear whether conservatives were on board with the bill. But the speaker seemed ready to make a bet—that when the crucial moment came, the conservatives who had said no to him would not do the same to Trump.
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