The Far Right Is Revolting

Not just in a general sense, but specifically over the Senate budget bill.

Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

The GOP is in disarray. Again.

The House has a limited amount of time to try and pass the Senate’s budget resolution, adopted this weekend by the upper chamber. In a few days, the House goes into recess, so Speaker Mike Johnson is now on hurry-up offense, referring the bill to the House Rules Committee this morning in order to get it to a floor vote by tomorrow.

It’s a wild move that he no doubt hopes will call the bluff of the many budget holdouts. Yet it appears that moment from Hamilton is upon him again: Speaker Johnson, “you don’t have the votes.”

Hardliners claim the Senate bill—which is an absolutely monstrous transfer of wealth to the uber-rich that adds crushing amounts to our national debt—simply doesn’t slash costs enough. Indeed, while the House version calls for $1.5 trillion in cuts—including, by inescapable math, massive cuts to Medicaid—the Senate’s version has just $4 billion in spending cuts, or basically nothing in their eyes.

If you’re wondering why there’s a huge spending gap between the plans, you’re not crazy. What’s actually crazy is that the GOP leadership allowed these two vastly different plans to develop on separate tracks, knowing that eventually they would have to bridge the big budgetary gap. Their “plan” appears to have been to keep kicking the can down the calendar, hoping opponents would blink in the face of threats from the White House to fall in line or else.

The problem is, the honeymoon from Trump’s election is over; the White House is now under siege for its disastrous tariff policies; Trump’s favorables are plummeting; and the Freedom Caucus members appear to be ready to stand their ground, as they did many times last year.

A budget-busting boondoggle for the rich

Yesterday, Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson met with members of the far right Freedom Caucus at the White House to urge fiscal hawks, who have doubts about the Senate budget resolution, to vote for it anyway.

Before we talk about how that meeting went, let’s review just how awful this Senate bill is. It would balloon the deficit by $7 trillion while giving a huge tax break to the super wealthy. In total, it would create over $37 trillion in new debt. To put that in context, that’s more added to the debt than the American Rescue Plan, CARES Act, the first Trump tax cuts and the Infrastructure Act combined.

To add to this outrageous list, the Senate bill tries to accomplish all this while hiding the ball from voters. It deploys a “creative” accounting method, advanced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), that simply pretends that there’s a “new baseline” for the budget because the 2017 Trump tax cuts would not be expiring. That accounting sleight of hand winds up being a cool “free” $4 trillion.

But as Catherine Rampell noted in her OpEd in the Washington Post, that’s “like saying even though your car lease has ended, leasing another car should count as ‘free’ because you got used to the convenience of having a vehicle around.”

Moreover, Republicans know that this is a cheat. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out, their same bill would increase the debt ceiling limit by $5 trillion. “If these tax breaks don’t have any cost, don’t add to the debt, why do they need to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion?”

Democrats in the House aren’t lying down either. In a challenge to Speaker Johnson to debate the budget bill “mano a mano” with him, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries noted that it would slash Medicaid, veteran benefits and food assistance just to give tax breaks to the rich. (Note that the House version of the bill isn’t any better. That version specifies $1.5 trillion in cuts that would devastate the same programs.)

“One big, beautiful bill”

Despite these terrible outcomes and the shady accounting involved, or perhaps because of them, Trump posted online that the Senate’s budget “has my Complete and Total Endorsement and Support.” He added, “There is no better time than now to get this deal DONE! The House, the Senate and our Great Administration, are going to work tirelessly on creating ‘THE ONE BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,’ an appropriate name if Congress so likes.”

He ended with an Trumpian ALL CAPS admonition: “THE HOUSE MUST PASS THIS BUDGET RESOLUTION, AND QUICKLY — MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Despite the wishes expressed in his post and a meeting with the GOP holdouts, and rather fortunately for our country so far, things aren’t looking so great for the resolution’s passage by the House this week.

”Close your eyes and get there.”

The meeting apparently failed to flip more than two votes, meaning dozens of GOP members remain undecided or outright opposed. Some, including Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Rich McCormick (R-GA), who is undecided but highly skeptical, were not even invited to attend.

Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris (R-MD) was invited to the meeting but, in a bad sign for the White House and Speaker Johnson, declined to attend, saying there was nothing Trump could say that would change his mind. “There’s nothing that I can hear at the White House that I don’t understand about the situation,” Harris told Politico. Trump, he added, should “spend time with people whose minds he might change. He’s just not going to change my mind.”

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, put it bluntly. “Why am I voting on a budget based on promises that I don’t believe are going to materialize?” he asked. After the meeting, Roy confirmed to CNN’s Manu Raju that he was still a “no” on the budget.

If you spend your time counting “no” votes like I do, we’re already past the number that would sink the bill, even just figuring in Burchett, McCormick, Harris and Roy. But there are probably many more. As NOTUS reported, “There are significant people who are still opposed,” one GOP member who attended the meeting told a reporter.

Trump later posted that he was open to cuts of up to $1 trillion, seeking to meet House members halfway. But as discussed above, the Senate version of the bill has just $4 billion in spending cuts. So as Jake Sherman noted on his podcast The Daily Punch, they could begin the reconciliation process without a budget, which would be getting things quite backward and chaotic out of the gate. Or they could seek to amend the current resolution, which no one wants to do, or they could enter a formal conference negotiation, which would expose how big the divide really is.

Or the hardliners could just be told to believe as a matter of trust and faith that their desired changes will come later. This is a dicey proposition because the Senate version so often controls during the budget reconciliation process. The Freedom Caucus knows it can kill the Senate version of the bill now by refusing to provide its votes, which would force GOP leadership back to the drawing board. So if I were them at this point in the process, backed up against a wall, that’s what I’d do.

Perhaps Speaker Johnson had hoped Trump could whip wayward GOP members in line, just as he did for the continuing resolution and the House version of the budget resolution. But in a sign of his dwindling political capital, Trump’s usual browbeating and steamrolling aren’t working so far.

Last night’s comments by Trump at a GOP gala fundraiser were telling. “Close your eyes and get there,” Trump urged attendees to do on the budget.

If that’s their actual whip strategy to get to 217 votes, well then they have my thoughts and prayers.

Jesus take the wheel?

Speaker Johnson is presently running the same “see where the chips fall” strategy he normally runs. This morning, he pushed the Senate bill forward to the House Rules Committee, even though it doesn’t seem like he’s got nearly enough votes for passage.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is likely shaking her head. She’s famous for never losing a floor vote, and certainly would never have pushed for a vote that seems destined to fail.

Speaker Johnson famously sees himself as a Moses-like character, leading his party through the wilderness. But it’s already clear that his hold is beginning to slip and that he can’t part a red wave, let alone the Red Sea.

NOTUS noted this particularly colorful exchange with one House member:

[A]s Johnson tries to wrangle the votes for the Senate-adopted budget, there is another larger problem for the speaker: He’s losing goodwill among House Republicans.

According to three sources, [Rep.] Steube went off on Johnson during Tuesday’s meeting, calling the speaker a liar and saying, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus!”

Rep. Steube’s outburst wasn’t over the budget but rather over how Johnson tried to kill a discharge petition to allow new parents to vote by proxy. Still, it was evidence that members do not respect Johnson or fear him in any meaningful way.

And with Trump’s grip also loosening, things may grow decidedly chaotic as Republicans try to band together to pass this budget.

While members are busy rebuking Speaker Johnson in Jesus’s name, it’s worth observing that this is far from the kind of budget He would ever approve of. It’s one tailored to their wealthy donors, with the burden squarely on the backs of the poor, who are already facing thousands in new taxes annually from Trump’s tariffs. That’s got to worry swing district House GOP members, whose votes Johnson will also need. They would have to explain to angry retirees at town halls why they’re slashing Medicaid after all, even after pinky swearing they wouldn’t.

That takes us back to the fundamental tension with the budget bill. Hardliners demand deeper cuts than it currently proposes, while vulnerable members don’t want Medicaid touched. Everyone in the party wants a huge tax cut for the wealthy, but no one wants to be blamed for ballooning the deficit.

This is all magical thinking, beginning with the idea that you can continue to grant tax giveaways to the rich without any consequence. And it’s about to catch up to them.