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.
“I voted for this bill for one reason,” Roy said, referring to the House product ending roughly 60% of the climate law’s green energy tax credits. “I need the United States Senate to hear this as clearly as I can say it … you backslide one inch on those IRA subsidies and I’m voting against this bill.”
“Those godforsaken subsidies are killing our energy, killing our grid, making us weaker, destroying our landscape, undermining our freedom,” Roy added. “If you [the Senate] mess up the Inflation Reduction Act, ‘Green New Scam’ subsidies, I ain’t voting for that bill.”
His remarks notably called out a leading proponent for salvaging some of the IRA’s tax credits, Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, by name. The North Carolina Republican has advocated against a complete repeal of the IRA’s energy subsidies and has voiced discomfort with preserving House language aggressively phasing down certain IRA green energy incentives.
Thirteen House Republicans, led by moderate Republican Virginia Rep. Jen Kiggans, wrote to Senate GOP leadership Friday urging the upper chamber to water down IRA phaseout schedules for certain tax credits pushed by the HFC. The GOP moderates cited the need to maintain industry certainty and the billions of dollars in investment and energy jobs that would be jeopardized if the Senate approves the House language.
Republican New York Rep. Nick LaLota drew a red line of his own Friday. The moderate House Republican helped quadruple the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the House-passed bill, which will primarily benefit high-income households in blue states, according to multiple analyses.
Senate Republicans have not hid their dislike for the provision and voiced sympathy for rolling back the deduction cap. “There’s not one Republican in the United States Senate who gives a shit about SALT,” Republican North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer told reporters in May.
“If the Senate waters it [$40,000 SALT cap] down by a dollar, I’m a no on the OBBB,” LaLota wrote on X Friday, referring to the Republicans’ preferred acronym for Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill.”
Though a complete draft of the Senate-amended bill has yet to be released, some GOP senators have proposed surpassing House Republicans’ proposed spending cuts and identify $2 trillion or more in savings over a ten-year period.
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