President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure GOP holdouts to support the “one big, beautiful” reconciliation bill with a plea for unity failed Tuesday morning despite a personal visit to Capitol Hill.
Blue-state House Republicans seeking a higher state and local tax cap emerged from the House Republican conference meeting without moving an inch on their opposition. Several House Freedom Caucus members, who have urged deeper cuts into Medicaid spending, also left the meeting as holdouts.
Inside the conference room, sources told the Washington Examiner that Trump called out SALT Caucus lawmakers, asking them to back down and accept the newest offer Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) proposed after a meeting Monday night. The speaker offered a $40,000 cap that goes back to the originally proposed $30,000 after four years.
Trump specifically pointed to Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in the meeting, telling him, “I know your district better than you do. If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway.”
Lawler and fellow New York Rep. Nick LaLota (R) were unconvinced by Trump’s speech. Lawler said he’s still a “no” on the reconciliation bill, which calls for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to offset extending Trump’s 2017 tax breaks.
“This is the single biggest issue that I’ve talked about, and while I respect the president, I’m not budging,” Lawler said coming out of the meeting.
When asked about the president’s remarks targeting him, he referred to being one of the three Republicans representing a blue district.
“Look, the President can say whatever he wants, and I respect him, but the fact is, I certainly understand my district. I’m one of only three Republican members that won in a district [former Vice President] Kamala Harris won, and I did so for reasons,” Lawler said.
He said on Monday that the GOP wouldn’t have the majority “if you didn’t have members in seats like mine.”
“And so if they think we’re going to throw our constituents under the bus to appease [the Freedom Caucus], it’s not happening,” Lawler added.
LaLota also said he’s still a “no” on the bill and told reporters ahead of the meeting he was not in favor of the $40,000 cap. He thinks the president is still on board to “do right by middle class Americans,” despite Trump seeming to soften on SALT. He told reporters ahead of the meeting with Republicans that raising the SALT cap benefits Democratic governors.
“We don’t want to benefit Democrat governors,” the president said.
LaLota interpreted the president’s message on SALT as “figure it out.”
“Those numbers last night didn’t work for me and the members of the SALT caucus,” LaLota said of the $40,000 cap. “We need a little more salt on the table to get to yes. And I hope the president’s presence motivates my leadership to give us a number that we can go sell back at home … All they need from this town is [a] little salt. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
SALT Republicans are meeting with Johnson at 2 p.m., per Punchbowl News.
Trump denies being frustrated with ‘grandstanders’ as Freedom Caucus digs in heels
The president has called on Republicans to stop being “grandstanders” and unite behind the bill, supporting the speaker’s ambitious deadline of passing the legislation by Memorial Day.
A White House official told the Washington Examiner that Trump “made it clear he’s losing patience with all holdout factions of the House Republican Conference, including the SALT Caucus and the House Freedom Caucus. The President is clear: he wants EVERY Republican to vote yes.”
Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) said that Trump was the “most animated” he’s seen on policy.
“He’s frustrated with the case of our progress; he made it pretty clear,” the South Dakota Republican said. “We need to quit screwing around and we need to get the one big, beautiful bill passed.”
Trump denied he was losing patience with House Republicans, calling it a “meeting of love.”
“I didn’t even talk about that — in fact, it’s the opposite. I’m not losing patience, we’re ahead of schedule … Why don’t you go back to your source and tell them they’re liars, if the source even exists,” Trump said.
The Freedom Caucus didn’t receive much of an admonishment from Trump inside the conference room, though the president told his loyal rabblerousers that they needed to “leave Medicaid alone.” Fiscal hawks within the hard-line conservative caucus have argued the bill doesn’t go far enough to address spending or the deficit, and they have advocated pushing up the effective date for the program’s work requirements.
“Don’t f*** around with Medicaid,” Trump said simply.
Centrists such as Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who had expressed concerns about reforms to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, were pleased with Trump’s messaging on the beneficiary program.
“That’s what the conference needed,” Bacon said, coming out of the meeting with Trump.
Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) agreed, saying it “reinforced the message I’ve been saying for a while: Don’t touch it.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said he’s not 100% satisfied with the bill and told reporters leaving Tuesday’s meeting with Trump that he thought the president did a “great job.”
“One of the greatest speeches I’ve heard. And it’s real. It was off the cuff. And he said the right things,” Norman said.
Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-MD) is also unmoved by Trump’s plea for unity, adding that he doesn’t think the president has secured enough votes to pass the legislation.
“We’re still a long ways away, but we can get there — maybe not by tomorrow,” Harris said.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), former chairman of the HFC, told reporters he was still a no on the current deal, but said he is “looking through it.”
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO), a Freedom Caucus member, told reporters leaving the meeting that he was still a “no” as of now. His concerns surround the backloading of savings versus the frontloading of spending.
“I think that there’s some things that we could move easily to make it more comfortable for a lot of people like myself,” Burlison said.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has an icy relationship with Trump due to his frequent opposition to Republican-backed spending bills, is still a “hard no” on the bill. However, he said he thinks Trump was able to convince the Freedom Caucus and SALT Caucus folks to “give up their fights.”
“I predict they get the bill passed,” Massie said. “He was very personal, very persuasive.”
Trump hasn’t had very kind words to say about Massie lately. Ahead of the meeting, he told reporters that he doesn’t think Massie “understands government” and he should be “voted out of office.”
Massie said he wasn’t “offended by anything [Trump] said.”
“I’m the only Republican right now that you can count on to vote against this vote … It’s not consequential to my vote today, like whether he endorses me or attacks me. It’s just not — doesn’t change the facts,” Massie added.
Some Republicans are pleased with what they heard, but understand it will take more than an impassioned speech from Trump.
“I think you get the sort of vibe that everybody’s, you know, ‘rah, rah,’ and we’re together, and then everybody walks out of the room,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AK) told reporters. “We’ll see. I mean, at the end of the day, people have to make a decision on their own, they have to calculate– I guess, the political calculation has to be made at home.”
The next step in the reconciliation process is a Rules Committee meeting at 1 a.m. on Wednesday. Both Norman and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who have said they are not pleased with the legislation as it stands, sit on the committee. If both vote against the bill in committee, it can still go to the floor.
After the meeting, Norman wouldn’t say whether he was swayed to vote “yes” on the legislation. But he said on Monday he’d allow the bill to pass through the Rules Committee, as he thinks it deserves a floor vote.
Harris and Roy have said they think it would be best to postpone the Rules vote, as more work must be done.
“We made enough progress that we thought in good faith, we should move it forward,” Roy said Monday of the legislation advancing out of the Budget Committee. “But let’s be clear, there are still very strong outstanding questions, and I think there are people across the entire conference who recognize that, and it is a mistake for this important of a policy to jam it through.”
Johnson, however, is in high spirits after the meeting with Trump and is moving full steam ahead with pushing for a floor vote as soon as Wednesday evening.
REPUBLICANS MUSCLE THE ‘BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’ OUT OF THE BUDGET COMMITTEE
At a press conference following lawmakers’ meeting with Trump, he said there was “high energy and high excitement” inside the conference room. He said, “Failure is not an option,” and expressed confidence that Republicans could pass the legislation this week.
Leaving the presser, the speaker said he would now spend the day meeting with the “small subgroups” and “tie up the remaining loose ends.”
Christian Datoc contributed to this report.
