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The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to adopt a budget framework supported by GOP leadership and President Donald Trump on Tuesday, allowing Speaker Mike Johnson to hold on to his image as a unifiying voice among Republicans in the chamber.
Johnson and Rep Jodey Arrington, the House GOP’s Budget committee chairman, were able to win over several key holdouts within the Republican Party who felt that the plan did not do enough to cut federal spending. Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against the legislation after several others fell back into line, including Reps Victoria Spartz and Warren Davidson.
Leadership initially abandoned plans to call a vote on the bill Tuesday evening, then dragged lawmakers back to the floor more than an hour after the bill was originally scheduled to be taken up. It was then passed by a vote of 217 to 215.
“There’s no Plan B. This is the plan we’re running,” Johnson told reporters as he walked to the floor for the bill’s passage.
Democrats were eager to mock their Republican colleagues for being unable to unify behind Johnson’s legislation throughout the evening, while trashing the GOP’s priorities for spending cuts, an indication of just how surprising Johnson’s late-game dealmaking really was. The legislation, while just a framework, calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts. Republicans have indicated that they will look to Medicaid programs to make up much of that ground.
“How can anybody show their faces in their districts after voting for this?” asked Rep Brittany Pettersen, a Democrat who flew in with her newborn to oppose the measure, said in a floor speech after the vote was called.
Reports indicated that the president himself was actively involved in calling holdout members, including Massie, in the minutes leading up to the vote. Trump’s stake in the legislation is obvious, as it provides more funding for border security measures while also laying the path for an extension of the 2017 tax cuts which became his main legislative achievement in his first term.
Johnson’s budget plan is far from becoming law, however. The Senate, which is currently held by a similarly slim GOP margin, has indicated that changes will need to be made for the legislation to be acceptable in the upper chamber; it also only represents a base framework upon which the actual budget legislation will be written in the coming days and weeks.
Still, the passage of the framework is a major victory for Johnson and likely means that the process will continue on his terms, rather than the two-track process desired by Senate Budget Committee chairman Lindsey Graham.
Tuesday’s vote and the sudden nature of the collapse of opposition against the budget framework within the GOP caucus is a sign of how much influence the president retains over individual House members in particular, as those members who’d flipped their votes were vocal in their misgivings about the legislation in media throughout the past several days.
