President Donald Trump moved to quash House Republicans’ debate over key aspects of his “one big, beautiful bill” with a high-profile visit to Capitol Hill on Monday morning.
Trump’s decision to meet with House GOP lawmakers comes as Speaker Mike Johnson is seeking to steer the president’s sweeping tax and spending package through a House-wide floor vote by Thursday to meet the speaker’s Memorial Day deadline. Trump reportedly took stances on several issues, including reforms to Medicaid and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) cap, that fiscal hawks and centrist Republicans have not found consensus on thus far.
“Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” Trump reportedly said during a closed-door meeting with House Republicans in the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s frank comments about the need to preserve coverage for Americans enrolled in Medicaid comes as conservative fiscal hawks are pushing for deeper reforms to the entitlement program. Moderate Republicans have warned that pursuing changes to the federal cost share for Medicaid, known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), could lead to more Americans being kicked off of Medicaid rolls.
The president has repeatedly said he only wants to see reforms to Medicaid that address “waste, fraud and abuse” in the entitlement program.
House GOP leadership is racing to get the ideologically diverse Republican conference in alignment on the president’s budget reconciliation bill by the end of the week. Though roughly 95% of the bill is complete, House Republicans are still looking to strike a deal on reforms to Medicaid, the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy subsidies and the SALT cap, according to House GOP leadership staff.
Johnson can afford to lose just three Republican votes assuming all members are present and voting.
House Republicans are slated to vote on advancing the package from the influential House Rules Committee on Wednesday at 1 a.m. Republican Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, who both voted“present” during the bill’s consideration on the House Budget Committee, are seen as crucial votes for allowing the package to advance to floor-wide House vote.
Both Roy and Norman are advocating for House Republicans to take a more aggressive approach to Medicaid and the green energy tax breaks while standing firm against raising the SALT cap, which many GOP lawmakers see as a gift to high-tax blue states.
Trump also urged blue-state Republicans to agree on a SALT proposal that would triple the current cap. GOP lawmakers that are members of the SALT caucus have been demanding a higher deduction cap that some Republican lawmakers have panned as a nonstarter.
“Well, SALT is a very interesting thing,” Trump told reporters during his visit to the Capitol. “The big JB [Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker] is going nowhere, probably right now, he could be the worst governor in the country, but Illinois and Gavin ‘Newscum,’ those are the people that want this, and they’re Democrat states.”
Despite Trump’s plea for House Republicans to get to a “yes” on the budget reconciliation package, a significant number of House Republicans, including members of the conservative Freedom Caucus, said the president’s visit did not sway their vote — at least for the time being.
“We’re still a long ways away but we can get there — maybe not by tomorrow,” Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris told reporters following Trump’s visit.
The president urged House Republicans to fall in line behind the bill incorporating a vast swathe of his first-year policy goals.
“We have a tremendously unified party,” Trump told reporters before meeting with House Republicans. “There are some people who want a couple of things that maybe I don’t like or that they’re not going to get.”
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer announced Tuesday that nearly 1,000 stakeholders have endorsed the legislative package incorporating vast swathes of the president’s agenda.
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