The House voted on Thursday to pass a budget framework authored by Republicans in the Senate, after delays and negotiations between GOP leadership and hardline deficit hawks in their caucus.
Speaker Mike Johnson appeared at a joint press conference with Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Thursday as the two tried to convince holdout conservative Republicans to back a Senate budget framework without language guaranteeing that committee chairs will find at least $1.5trn in spending cuts.
Congress is seeking to pass a budget framework for the upcoming year that would begin the reconciliation process, which will combine the Senate-passed legislation with a framework passed by the House in February to create one bill that would then be passed by both chambers.
Originally, the vote on the Senate framework was scheduled by the speaker to take place Wednesday evening. But after more than an hour of negotiations and delays on and off the House floor, Johnson called it off.
Congressional leaders struggled over Wednesday and into Thursday to win over that contingent of conservative deficit hawks, and a vote was pushed back again several times Thursday morning. But Johnson projected confidence, while a handful of conservatives who’d previously been opposed to the Senate framework seemed to indicate that their opposition was wavering.
“I believe we have the votes,” Johnson told reporters Thursday morning.
Voting on the resolution began shortly after 10:30am on Thursday. Johnson’s prediction was correct: the measure pased, 216-214, shortly after 11:00am.
The budget framework passed by the House in February includes steep cuts to nondefense spending that many experts say will not be doable without touching a major political landmine: Medicaid. The nation’s health insurance program for low-income families and persons accounts for nearly $1trn a year in spending.
Conservatives are more than happy to chop away at that number, and are eager for Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to discover what it believes to be waste, fraud or abuse within Medicaid and other federal programs as Congress seeks to reach that $1.5trn spending cut floor. But Republicans in frontline purple districts are far less enthusiastic, with many outright saying they will vote against final passage of the budget if Medicaid service reductions or eligibility cuts are implemented as a result.
The plan also addresses a number of other priorities held by President Donald Trump, including a surge of funding for border security and the further construction of a wall across the southern border. Additionally, it would extend the 2017 tax cut legislation signed into law under Trump’s first term, a favorite target of progressive groups which accuse the GOP of funding tax cuts that disproportionately benefited wealthier Americans with spending cuts that affect the poorest families in America.
A number of conservatives who originally were opposed to the Senate resolution would not say whether their votes had changed on Thursday, even as many still had posts stating their opposition to (or, in some cases, their open derision of) the Senate plan near the top of their respective social media accounts.
More to follow…