‘Will Not Accept It’: House Conservatives Draw Line In The Sand As Senate Reviews ‘Beautiful’ Bill

The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) is drawing a line in the sand against hypothetical Senate changes to weaken or strike certain policies from the House-passed “one big, beautiful” bill.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is currently shepherding President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill — incorporating vast swathes of his second term’s legislative agenda — through the upper chamber to meet Republicans’ July 4 deadline. The HFC, which secured last-minute changes to the House-version achieving greater spending reduction, fired off a warning to Senate GOP leadership Friday suggesting that walking back those policy “victories” would be a red line for the conference.

“We want to be crystal clear: if the Senate attempts to water down, strip out, or walk back the hard-fought spending reductions and IRA Green New Scam rollbacks achieved in this legislation, we will not accept it,” the HFC posted to X on Friday.

Though HFC members ultimately supplied the votes to advance the president’s landmark bill in May, the House Republicans’ conservative flank is warning that failure to preserve the $1.6 trillion in spending cuts over a decade and the aggressive phase down of green energy tax breaks will jeopardize the Senate-amended bill’s passage in the House. The budget package will have to clear the lower chamber for a second time due to Senate modifications before landing on the president’s desk for signature.

Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy, the HFC policy chair, drew a red line on preserving House Republicans’ reforms to the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) energy subsidies in the Senate-amended bill during a speech on the House floor Friday morning.