The conservative holdouts to President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill said the president’s alleged commitment to strictly enforce the phase down of solar and wind credits won them over.
Though a flank of House conservatives threatened to derail the passage of the president’s tax and spending bill as recently as Wednesday evening, the cohort began singing the legislation’s praises by the following morning. The holdouts said that Trump’s pledge to continue cracking down on green energy subsidies persuaded them to back the president’s landmark bill despite securing no legislative fix to terminate solar and wind tax credits more expeditiously.
The House has not taken a vote on final passage due to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ hours-long speech on the lower chamber’s floor seeking to delay the passage of the president’s signature bill. Johnson told reporters Thursday morning he has the votes to send the budget package to Trump’s desk for signature.
“He [Trump] did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office to use things to make the bill better,” Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, one of the holdouts, told CNBC Thursday morning. “President Trump is going to use his powers to, like on the subsidies, to make sure that a lot of these subsidies won’t remain in effect from here on out.”
“I think the president was going to make sure those [eligibility requirements] were strictly adhered to,” Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, another holdout, told reporters Thursday regarding the alleged committments the president made.
The Senate-amended bill created more flexibility for solar and wind projects than the initial House draft by creating a one-year extension for developers to begin construction in order to claim the full value of investment and production tax credits. If projects do not meet the construction deadline, they would have to be connected to the grid by 2027 in order to be eligible for the tax credits.
Norman previously told the DCNF he could not support the Senate-amended proposal due to its failure to immediately terminate these tax credits.
“That’s got to go,” the South Carolina Republican said on June 27.
The overnight quelling of the House conservatives’ initial opposition appeared to demonstrate the pivotal role the president and his administration’s officials played until the final hours to flip holdouts and pass Trump’s domestic policy bill by his July 4 deadline.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise referred to the president as “our best closer” Wednesday.
Speaker Mike Johnson also attributed their success to the involvement of the president in persuading conservative holdouts to support his signature piece of legislation.
“The president helped answer questions. We had Cabinet secretaries involved, and experts in all the fields, and I think they got their [holdouts’] questions answered,” Johnson told reporters, after pulling an all-nighter to help flip holdouts.
Another argument that appeared to convince holdouts to back the bill is the fear that protracted negotiations with the Senate would make the bill less conservative than the legislation as currently-drafted.
Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski — who supplied the critical vote to pass Trump’s megabill in the upper chamber — secured an array of concessions that House conservatives blamed for adding to the deficit spending of the Senate’s proposal.
“What changed is the President — given us the fact that the longer we waited, and let’s say we had gotten it back to the Senate for changes, even minor changes, they were going to make it worse,” Norman said. “And we believed that. We held out as long as we could.”
“He [Trump] made it clear … had we put it back in the Senate, it was going to get worse,” Norman said. “They’re going to, particularly Murkowski was going to extract a pound of flesh for anything that was sent back.”
Republican Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson — who was one of two GOP lawmakers to oppose the initial House-passed draft — came to a similar conclusion in deciding to back the Senate-amended bill Wednesday.
“I wish it was a little better product, but I think it’s as good as we’re going to get — not just before July 4,” Davidson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If we ran it longer … the odds of getting a better product before that debt limit [deadline] are really low.”
Norman also said he decided to support the bill despite his continued concerns with the Senate amended-bill due to the need for Congress to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
Enacting a permanent extension of the tax relief provisions passed during Trump’s first term would avert a $1,700 tax hike on the average family of four making the median income, according to analysis from the Senate Finance Committee.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Andi Shae Napier contributed to this report.
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