By Catie Edmondson | The New York Times
Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda. But with a tiny margin of control in the House, he can afford to lose only three Republican votes (assuming Democrats uniformly oppose it).
The problem is that there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them. For every bloc with one demand that must be met before its members will support the measure, there is another demanding the opposite. Here are some of the combatants.
Deficit hawks: About three dozen Republicans have been strategizing in a group text and at the Capitol Hill home of one of the members. Most of them signed a letter earlier this year saying they would not vote for a bill that adds to the federal deficit. The bill’s current version would add $3.3 trillion over the next decade.
Swing-district survivors: The Republican Party owes its House majority partly to victories in politically competitive districts in California and New York, states where many constituents rely on Medicaid. At the behest of vulnerable members from those places, G.O.P. leaders dropped two of the most aggressive options they were considering to cut Medicaid costs. The Congressional Budget Office says that the legislation, as written, would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured and reduce spending by more than $700 billion over a decade.
Clean-energy advocates: The tax breaks in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act have been a boon to many Republican-held districts. That includes Juan Ciscomani’s Arizona seat, where Lucid Motors, an electric vehicle company, expanded its factory expecting to reap the law’s rewards. Ciscomani and his allies want to preserve those incentives, which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
State-tax deductors: The tax law Republicans passed in 2017 imposed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes Americans can write off on their federal returns. The bill now under discussion would triple that. But Republicans from high-tax states like New Jersey want to lift that cap substantially higher — and say they will take down the bill if it doesn’t. Conservatives say it’s an expensive handout to wealthy residents of blue states. Even a modest change, like doubling the cap for married couples, would cost about $230 billion over a decade.
The megabill advanced out of the Budget Committee on Sunday only because leaders told the dissenters that a later version would address their concerns. But Johnson may have a tough time passing this one. And then it would go to the Senate, where Republicans say they, too, have several objections.
