CNN
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President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is running into a wall in the sharply divided House Republican conference, with tensions spiking over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the party’s biggest sticking point: overhauling Medicaid.
As Johnson presses for a House vote before Memorial Day, the battlelines are becoming more pronounced, with Republicans in swing districts saying the sweeping bill can’t slash social safety net benefits while GOP hardliners are demanding trillions more in spending cuts – far beyond what many centrist members are willing to swallow.
Those frustrations emerged in a two-hour meeting in Johnson’s leadership suite on Tuesday night, in which the speaker huddled with roughly a dozen GOP centrists who have refused to back any Medicaid changes that could hurt eligible Americans who rely on the program.
Inside the room, Johnson made one more attempt to sell those members on a contentious plan — backed by the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and others — to sharply reduce Medicaid payments to states that expanded the program under Obamacare, according to two people in the room. His push drew a rebuke from multiple centrists in the room, who believed that idea was already off the table, the people said.
“We laid down the law,” one Republican member who had attended the meeting said of the firm position many members took.
Johnson and his leadership team insist that, in the end, GOP members will not be willing to stand in the way of Trump, who has said the actions taken in the next phase of his presidency will be charted through Capitol Hill. But the intraparty sparring between the two vastly disparate factions of Johnson’s conference raises the question of whether he can meet his own deadline to pass the package out of the House this month — with perhaps his own political survival on the line.
On Tuesday, some of those lawmakers also delivered a cautionary note to Johnson: They did not want to vote for any bill that Trump hadn’t endorsed, eager to avoid a repeat of 2017 when the president called the House GOP’s health care plan “mean” after they’d already passed it. Less than a year later, Republicans lost the chamber in the midterms.
“I don’t want to be mean,” Rep. Andrew Garbarino, a Republican from a New York swing district, told CNN on Wednesday. “And I think any time it looks like we’re actually hurting people, that’s gonna piss off the American population. And if you piss them off, they’re probably not going to vote for you.”
“The House cannot be its own worst enemy,” said Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, one of the moderates in the meeting. “We have to work in conjunction with the president.”
With their slim GOP majority, Johnson and his team have no choice but to mollify their centrist wing to pass the massive package along party lines. The bill would include new immigration restrictions, a massive increase in defense and border security spending and a two-year extension of the national debt limit. But the most divisive parts of the proposal involve the steep spending cuts the party is seeking on top of a multi-trillion-dollar overhaul of the tax code.
Many of those Republicans are staunchly opposed to the party’s push to use Trump’s agenda to chop spending on programs like Medicaid and food stamps — something that many of the House’s ultraconservatives are demanding. And those GOP hardliners are threatening not to support any plan without those big cuts.
Added to their problems: hard-right Republicans are demanding cuts well above $1.5 trillion — even as the centrist members are signaling such an approach would cost their support and are willing to see those cuts greatly reduced.
One visibly frustrated hardliner, GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, told CNN that Republicans would “fail” if they don’t find enough spending cuts to help jumpstart the economy.
“My colleagues, who do not want to address that, are burying their head in the sand and already trying to worry about elections next year, when the best way to win elections is to actually deliver,” said Roy, who can use his leverage as a member of a pair of key House panels to demand his own changes to the final bill.
Roy then offered this blunt warning: “I’ve got my own set of red lines I’m happy to start putting out there if they want me to.”
Rep. Rich McCormick added he “absolutely” would vote against the president’s agenda if it didn’t include at least $1.5 trillion in cuts, the goal outlined in the GOP’s budget blueprint. And McCormick was one of more than two dozen Republicans who signed onto a letter to Johnson on Wednesday that specifically called for “at least $2 trillion” in cuts.
“We made a promise to the people,” the Georgia Republican said. “The speaker made a promise to the people. The president made a promise to the people.”
A long-simmering rift between centrists and hardliners
The rift between the GOP’s centrist wing and its hardliners has been simmering long before Trump took office in January, fueled by years in a razor-thin majority. But those same Republicans are now under fierce pressure to deliver Trump’s high-stakes tax plan while satisfying demands that, at times, seem incompatible.
Ultraconservatives, for instance, want to cut as much as $5 trillion to pay for the full cost of Trump’s tax cuts. But others in the party, including those from battleground seats, believe they won’t even reach the party’s stated goal of $1.5 trillion in cuts.
“If we don’t [agree on $1.5 trillion in cuts], we should lower the number,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, a swing-district New York Republican. “We should do something that is compassionate yet reasonable to put our great country in a better trajectory.”
Some have said that GOP leadership had privately assured them – in conversations before they voted for that budget resolution – that the spending target was simply a goal and not a necessity.
“Leadership is telling everyone what they want to hear to get to the one-yard line,” a frustrated GOP lawmaker told CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss intraparty dynamics.
Yet some of those same more moderate Republicans – namely from New York and California – are pushing for an increase of the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, known as SALT, a costly proposal that has drawn the ire of hardliners.
“We have to address Medicaid,” Roy told CNN on Wednesday. “My colleagues, who are saying that they won’t touch it are the same colleagues, by the way, who want their SALT caps increased. Somebody come back and show me your basic math.”
Leadership and centrists did make some progress at the Tuesday meeting: They agreed on work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries, though they haven’t yet decided what age requirement to implement, according to a person in the room. They also agreed on more frequent eligibility checks to ensure only program-qualified people are accessing it and not to go after hospital funding, the person said.
But some of those members are still seeking assurances that Trump and the Senate GOP also back their plans — especially on Medicaid. One member told CNN that if House GOP leaders won’t hold formal talks with their Senate counterparts on the subject, the moderates themselves are willing to sit down with senators who’ve previously expressed opposition to such cuts.
Trump met with Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other key GOP committee leaders to discuss tax policy at the White House on Wednesday.
Johnson, returning from the White House, said any changes limiting Medicaid “would affect a very small number of people” but that overhauling federal contributions to state-run Medicaid programs, known as the FMAP, is “off the table.”
Publicly, the president has remained mostly silent on the policy details as Republicans have worked behind the scenes to write his bill. But Republicans across the conference believe the only way it will pass is if Trump takes sides publicly.
Rep. Eric Burlison, another GOP hardliner, told CNN that he will refuse to support any bill that adds to the deficit in any way — and that must include the cost of Trump’s tax cuts. That means the spending cuts would have to equal roughly $5 trillion – far beyond the scope of what is under discussion.
“Where my redline is is that I’m not going to be a part of causing the deficit to be any worse than it is today, that that gap and how much we’re adding to the national debt, I cannot live with myself if I … exacerbate that and make that worse,” Burlison said. “They need to find some way to offset the tax cuts.”
He added: “I’m not looking to see funny math.”
Some Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are also watching with concern as House GOP centrists look to narrow down the size of the spending cuts.
“I think you might see the Senate come up with more spending cuts,” said Sen. John Cornyn, emerging from the Senate GOP’s policy retreat Wednesday. “This is a once in a generation opportunity to get our fiscal house in better shape.”
CNN’s Morgan Rimmer, Aileen Graef, Alison Main and Casey Riddle contributed to this report.
