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After more than an hour of labored negotiations with conservative holdouts, House G.O.P. leaders yanked their blueprint for the president’s tax and spending package, lacking the votes to pass it.
- April 9, 2025Updated 8:29 p.m. ET
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday was forced to delay a vote on the Republican budget blueprint to unlock President Trump’s domestic agenda, after conservatives balked at a plan that they said would add too much to the nation’s debt.
In a dramatic scene on Capitol Hill that laid bare Republican divisions, Mr. Johnson huddled with the holdouts in a room off the House floor for over an hour before the vote was scheduled to begin, grinding activity in the chamber to a halt as the measure’s fate hung in the balance.
It has been a tried-and-true tactic for Mr. Johnson, who has previously succeeded at wearing down conservative opposition on the House floor by essentially daring would-be defectors to derail planned votes on Mr. Trump’s priorities.
But Wednesday night was a rare instance in which the hard-right Republicans refused to blink — at least for now — and it dealt the speaker, who had confidently predicted he would have the votes to push the measure through, a bruising setback.
Mr. Johnson emerged from the closed-door meeting on Wednesday night and told reporters the House would vote on the measure “probably tomorrow, one way or the other.”
There were still “a small subset of members who weren’t totally satisfied” with the bill, he said. Those lawmakers, who continued to huddle privately after Mr. Johnson delayed the vote, said they were seeking more assurances that the Senate would ultimately come up with deeper spending cuts than the resolution required.
