By Marianna Sotomayor, Jacob Bogage
House Republicans leaders rushed Wednesday to build support for President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration legislation, as dozens of lawmakers remain against the bill.
Lawmakers with objections to the Senate bill – which would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts, while strengthening immigration enforcement and defense – are shuttling between meetings with Trump at the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and his leadership lieutenants on Capitol Hill.
Fiscal hawks have concerns over the ballooning price of the legislation and some moderate conservatives are uneasy about the even steeper cuts to Medicaid in the Senate version of the bill.
“There is about half a trillion dollars over the [House] framework. I think there are a number of people concerned, including myself obviously,” House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said. “We don’t want to add billions of dollars to the debt that our kids are going to have a hard time digging out of.”
Two members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) voted against the bill already in the House Rules Committee, the bill’s first stop.
The House was expected to vote on a procedural vote – known as the rule – to advance the bill Wednesday, but as of Wednesday afternoon, leadership lacked the votes, according to multiple lawmakers and aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Johnson can only lose three Republicans if all lawmakers are present and voting to clinch success.
Johnson said Tuesday that the Senate “went a little further than many of us would have preferred,” but he vowed to “get that bill over the line.”
“A lot of people didn’t get what they wanted,” Johnson said. But, he continued, “the president said it’s his bill. It’s not a House bill, it’s not a Senate bill. It’s the American people’s bill.”
The Senate changes made the bill costlier; excluding borrowing costs, the House version would raise the national debt by $2.4 trillion over 10 years while the Senate bill increases it by $3.3 trillion.
To offset the cost, the legislation would cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other health care programs. It would also make reductions cuts to SNAP, the anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans who support the bill said the legislation would help the working-class voters who swept Trump to the White House and the GOP to unified control of Congress in November’s elections.
“If we don’t take a different trajectory, these programs will collapse under the economic failures of prior administrations,” Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-Utah) said on the House floor.
The bill would increase the child tax credit and adds a bonus to the standard deduction for seniors, a provision inspired by Trump’s campaign pledge to stop taxing Social Security benefits. It would also create savings accounts for newborns, seeded with $1,000 of taxpayer money, and it would allow buyers of American-made cars to deduct up to $10,000 in car loan interest.
But beyond those populist flourishes, the measure is regressive. The 10 percent of households with the lowest incomes would stand to be worse off by an average of $1,600 per year on average because of benefits cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House version of the bill. The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes would be better off by $12,000 on average.
The legislation would make permanent a trio of corporate tax deductions that would make it easier for companies to invest in research and purchase new equipment.
Adding in the impact of Trump’s tariffs – which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending – the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.
The nearly $170 billion in the bill to fund the Trump administration’s border and immigration crackdown would be one of the largest sums ever spent on homeland security, and an additional roughly $160 billion would flow to the Defense Department, partially for Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” continental missile defense system.
