CNN
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Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team are taking a major gamble Friday as they power ahead with a key committee vote that — as of the start of that meeting — appeared to lack the support needed to succeed.
The fate of the vote was still unclear even as the House Budget Committee’s GOP roster entered the Capitol for the meeting, with Republican lawmakers and senior aides tight-lipped about whether leadership had struck any deals with the conservatives who — just 12 hours earlier — were vowing to tank the bill.
“We did make progress BUT will see how MUCH progress we made!!” Rep. Ralph Norman, one of the GOP holdouts, told CNN ahead of the meeting.
But Rep. Chip Roy — one of Speaker Mike Johnson’s many holdouts on President Donald Trump’s megabill — sent a clear signal to GOP leadership ahead of that committee vote that he wasn’t yet there. Roy posted on X an outside analysis of the bill’s deficit impact with the caption: “Why there’s a problem,” just minutes before the start of the meeting.
The Budget Committee is meeting Friday to assemble the component pieces of the sweeping tax and spending cuts bill into a single legislative package. The panel is not empowered to make substantial policy changes during its meeting, but the bill needs to be advanced out of the committee to make it to a full floor vote.
Roy would not answer Friday morning when asked whether he would vote to advance the bill, instead raising his eyebrows as he entered the room.
Another one of the holdouts, Rep. Josh Brecheen, ignored questions from a reporter as he arrived on Friday morning.
House budget chief Rep. Jodey Arrington can only afford to lose two GOP votes in his committee vote. If it fails to clear the committee, it would signal major problems for Johnson and almost certainly delay the full House vote on Trump’s megabill, which is set to happen next week.
In a sign of the seriousness of the vote, GOP leaders pushed to have Rep. Brandon Gill, whose wife just had their second child, return to Washington on Friday morning for the vote. Two GOP sources previously told CNN on Thursday that Gill would not be in attendance — which would have meant House leaders could only lose a single vote.
Johnson and his team worked through the night to win over four conservative holdouts — Norman, Roy, Brecheen and Rep. Andrew Clyde — who had threatened one day earlier to tank Trump’s policy bill in committee, according to multiple Republicans familiar with the discussions. The four Republicans wanted to rewrite parts of the bill to save more money, specifically speeding up the roll-out of Medicaid work requirements and the repeal of clean energy tax credits that were enacted under the Biden administration.
Many of them urged Johnson to delay the vote. But GOP leaders refused to bend to hardliners’ demands to delay the vote and instead, Johnson and Arrington spent the night working to assuage conservative’s concerns and convince them to greenlight the bill Friday morning.
The committee’s meeting to advance Trump’s agenda turned dramatic early on Friday morning after four Republicans — Roy, Norman, Brecheen and Clyde, all of whom have signaled they would oppose the vote — walked out of the room where members were convening.
The members ignored questions from reporters on their way out and then huddled together in Roy’s office.
“All of us are very disappointed with the progress, or lack of. I’m done with smoke and mirrors. We got a math problem,” Norman told reporters as he walked back into the meeting. He would not say if he was willing to vote no and tank Trump’s measure.
”I think they should recess,” Roy said, ignoring questions about how he would vote.
