WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Republicans in the House of Representatives on Wednesday struggled to pass President Donald Trump’s massive tax-cut and spending bill as a handful of hardliners withheld their support over concerns about its cost.
As lawmakers shuttled in and out of closed-door meetings, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was trying to convince the holdouts to back Trump’s signature bill. “We are working through everybody’s issues and making sure that we can secure this vote. I feel very positive about the progress,” he told reporters.
With a narrow 220-212 majority, Johnson can afford no more than three defections from his ranks, and skeptics from the party’s right flank said they had more than enough votes to block the bill.
“He knows I’m a ‘no.’ He knows that I don’t believe there are the votes to pass this rule the way it is,” Republican Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, leader of the hardline Freedom Caucus, told reporters.
Trump, who is pressing lawmakers to get him the bill to sign into law by the July 4 Independence Day holiday, met with some of the dissenters at the White House. But with the outcome uncertain, Republican leaders delayed a procedural vote for hours as they worked to shore up support.
Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said they would wait until several lawmakers who had been delayed by storms arrived from out of town. “We need their votes, and they’re going to be here shortly,” he told reporters.
Republicans in Congress have struggled to stay united in recent years, but they also have not defied Trump since he returned to the White House in January.
Any changes made by the House would require another Senate vote, which would make it all but impossible to meet the July 4 deadline.
The legislation contains most of Trump’s top domestic priorities, from tax cuts to immigration enforcement.
The Senate passed the legislation, which nonpartisan analysts say will add $3.4 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade, by the narrowest possible margin on Tuesday after intense debate on the bill’s hefty price tag and $900 million in cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for low-income Americans.
Similar divides exist in the House, which passed an earlier version of the bill in May that carried a lower price tag. The loudest objections come from hardline conservatives angry that it does not sufficiently cut spending.
“What the Senate did was unconscionable,” said Republican Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of two hardliners who voted against the bill in an overnight committee hearing.
TAX CUTS, IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN
The bill would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, cut health and food safety net programs, fund Trump’s immigration crackdown, and zero out many green-energy incentives. It also includes a $5 trillion increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, which lawmakers must address in the coming months or risk a devastating default on the nation’s $36.2 trillion debt.
Democrats are united in opposition to the bill, saying that its tax breaks disproportionately benefit the wealthy while cutting services that lower- and middle-income Americans rely on. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that almost 12 million people could lose health insurance as a result of the bill.
“This bill is catastrophic. It is not policy, it is punishment,” Democratic Representative Jim McGovern said in debate on the House floor.
The Medicaid cuts have also raised concerns among some Republicans, prompting the Senate to set aside more money for rural hospitals.
(Reporting by Bo Erickson, Richard Cowan, David Morgan, additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone, Cynthia Osterman, Mark Porter and Chizu Nomiyama)
Comments