CNN
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President Donald Trump summoned members of a key wing of the Republican Party to the White House Wednesday, as they threaten to defy GOP leaders and prevent his agenda from advancing out of the House this week.
It’s a high-stakes moment for Trump and the GOP hardliners, who have vowed for weeks that they won’t support any Republican plan that doesn’t tackle the nation’s ballooning deficit. The resistance is enough to block Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts bill from reaching the floor, imperiling House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plans to muscle the package out of the House before the Memorial Day recess.
Trump warned the House GOP a day earlier that they should stop pushing for changes and simply accept the current version of the bill. But the conservatives — led by Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas — trekked to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to meet face-to-face with Trump just hours after they declared they would oppose the bill without more changes.
“For the bill to move off of the floor, these issues have to be addressed,” Roy told reporters in an ad hoc news conference Wednesday afternoon, flanked by a half-dozen other conservatives. “I want to be very clear, and that has to be addressed today, tomorrow, whenever we get to it, that has to be done right.”
GOP leaders believed they came much closer to a deal after Trump’s impassioned plea to their conference at the US Capitol Tuesday — and did manage to win over a handful of recalcitrant Northeastern moderates who’d been seeking more generous state and local deductions for their home states. That progress, however, seemed to stall overnight, after Roy and other Freedom Caucus members met with White House staff.
The ultraconservatives had demanded changes to the bill, such as bigger cuts to clean energy programs, which they’ve dubbed the “Green New Scam,” and changes to Medicaid state financing. While people in those talks said the White House had been amenable to those changes, multiple people close to leadership said a formal deal was not reached.
The talks have gone so sideways that some of the GOP hardliners were even privately floating to leadership that they abandon the “one big, beautiful bill” path and instead attempt to pass two separate bills – saving the harder tax policy for later this year, according to one of those people.
A White House official told CNN that talks with the House Freedom Caucus had not yet yielded progress, but that the meeting was on the books to “hopefully strike” a deal.
“There was no deal. The White House presented HFC with policy options that the administration can live with, provided they can get the votes, but they cannot get the votes,” the official said. “There was no deal. The HFC will meet with the President at 3pm to hopefully strike one.”
The meeting lasted just under two hours, and had continued even as Trump stepped out to appear at a separate White House event.
Earlier in the morning, some of the conservatives were still seeking major changes to Medicaid that Johnson had already ruled out, such as lowering the federal government’s match rate to state Medicaid payments, known as the federal medical assistance percentage or FMAP.
“There are several levers,” Rep. Keith Self of Texas told CNN when asked about the many changes he’s still seeking to Medicaid, even after Trump told members “not to f**k” with the program the day before.
Asked whether FMAP remained on the table, Self replied: “For me it is.”
One of the major issues: Johnson, Trump and conservatives do not agree that this week marks a true deadline in the program.
“This is an arbitrary deadline,” Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said, adding that it is designed “to force people in a corner to make bad decisions.”
That’s a major problem for Johnson, who has insisted the bill needs to pass this week. House GOP leaders are pushing hard for a vote Wednesday, since they could have attendance issues on Thursday ahead of the long weekend.
“We’re going to have a discussion at the White House about that, and we’re trying to get the bill in the best possible form, and we’re trying to meet our deadline for the vote,” Johnson said as he left for the White House. “The president’s called for it, we’ve been saying this for many months.”
The speaker said he was “working through” the “deliberative slow process,” acknowledging with such a narrow margin he must “work with every member and hear their concerns and work with them and try to try to meet the equilibrium point with as many people as you can.”
House GOP Leader Steve Scalise similarly argued that the conference must forge ahead.
“Well, we’ve been continuing to work through issues, but we also have known that we got to keep the bill moving, because there’s a lot more steps in this process. I mean, the Senate, of course, has to go and do their work. You know, you’ve got other things like the debt ceiling in the bill that do have timelines,” he said.
Asked multiple times if the vote is still expected Wednesday night, Scalise replied, “We’re moving forward with the vote.”
This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Alayna Treene, Morgan Rimmer, Manu Raju and Lauren Fox contributed to this report.
