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Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda. But with a tiny margin of control in the House, he can afford to lose only three Republican votes (assuming Democrats uniformly oppose it).
The problem is that there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them. For every bloc with one demand that must be met before its members will support the measure, there is another demanding the opposite. Here are some of the combatants.
Deficit hawks: About three dozen Republicans have been strategizing in a group text and at the Capitol Hill home of one of the members. Most of them signed a letter earlier this year saying they would not vote for a bill that adds to the federal deficit. The bill’s current version would add $3.3 trillion over the next decade.
Swing-district survivors: The Republican Party owes its House majority partly to victories in politically competitive districts in California and New York, states where many constituents rely on Medicaid. At the behest of vulnerable members from those places, G.O.P. leaders dropped two of the most aggressive options they were considering to cut Medicaid costs. The Congressional Budget Office says that the legislation, as written, would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured and reduce spending by more than $700 billion over a decade.
