Hard-line House conservatives say personal appeals from President Trump will not be enough to sway them to support a Senate budget resolution to advance the White House’s legislative agenda.
A group of House Republicans critical of the Senate’s framework for advancing Trump’s legislative agenda are set to meet with the president at the White House at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, marking the president’s most significant foray yet into the push to adopt the framework in the lower chamber.
But in an eye-catching twist, a number of the most outspoken opponents of the budget resolution are not going to the meeting with the president, signaling they have little interest in being strong-armed by the White House on a measure they abhor.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) — the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which is full of budget resolution opponents — said he was invited to the meeting with Trump, but declined.
“There’s nothing that I can hear at the White House that I don’t understand about the situation,” he told reporters.
Harris said personal appeals from Trump — which helped usher a House version of the budget resolution across the finish line in February — will not be fruitful without other commitments.
“It’s not going to help getting enough votes to pass this week. It’s just, there are too many members who are just not going to vote for it no matter what,” Harris said.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), a Freedom Caucus member, sounded a similar note, arguing that what the group sees as flaws in the resolution are too serious to overlook, regardless of Trump’s lobbying campaign.
“I think that because what the Senate sent over is so financially immoral, that it doesn’t matter how much pressure,” Burlison said. “There’s many of us that can’t swallow it.”
A third House conservative opposed to the budget resolution aired a harrowing warning to House GOP leadership: “It will not pass if it’s put on the floor.”
“They should not put it on the floor,” the lawmaker added.
The White House meeting comes as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is struggling to coalesce his razor-thin majority around the measure, which would unlock the budget reconciliation process Republicans are looking to use to pass tax cuts, border funding and energy policy.
Harris said there are “definitely more than a dozen” hard-line conservatives who plan to vote against the resolution due to the belief it does not contain sufficient commitments that the Senate will accept sweeping spending cuts.
Johnson can only afford to lose three votes, assuming there is full attendance in the chamber.
“I want to end up with deficit reduction, I want to end up with tax cuts, but I haven’t seen it so far,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who is planning to vote against the resolution but is not attending Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve just got an impasse, we’ve got to work through it.”
Harris and other members have urged House GOP leaders to skip a budget resolution vote altogether and start working on the details so they can get up-front commitments from the Senate, but House GOP leaders have rejected that, saying it is urgent to quickly move on the formalities of the legislation while saying it does not prevent the final bill having historic cuts.
“The country can’t afford for us to delay a month or longer to wait on the Senate getting where we are,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said.
Johnson huddled with members of the House Freedom Caucus on Monday night, which the Speaker said was “productive.” Administration officials also met with the hard-line group Monday night: office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, OMB Deputy Director Dan Bishop, and White House Office of Legislative Affairs Director James Braid.
Harris, though, said there was “no progress” after the Monday night meeting.
Jonson said it sounded “uncharacteristic” for Harris to decline a White House meeting, saying he is “a very reasonable guy.”
The main concern among deficit hawks is that the Senate’s budget resolution directs each chamber to find a different amount of spending cuts. House committees, for example, are ordered to find at least $1.5 trillion in cuts to federal spending, far more than the approximately $4 billion that Senate panels are mandated to slash.
The other qualm rests in the fact the Senate is using a budgetary gimmick known as current policy baseline, which assumes the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts would not add to the deficit — despite the Congressional Budget Office saying it would cost about $4 trillion.
“They’re ridiculously low, and we have no confidence in the Senate to do anything other than reach the lowest point,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), another Freedom Caucus member opposed to the budget resolution, said of the Senate framework. Self said he would not attend Tuesday’s White House meeting.
While conservatives are dismissing the power Trump’s lobbying could have on the holdouts, recent legislative battles have shown his pressure can be potent. In February, phone calls from Trump helped get the House’s budget resolution over the finish line, and in March, intervention from the president helped coalesce the conference around a funding bill to avert a government shutdown.
The hard-liners, however, are insisting that this time is different.
“The Republican conference had a generally united goal of what we were trying to do on the budget, meaning that was a lift that we could get there, even though there were people who had concerns that it wasn’t good enough. … Was it perfect? Was it what I wanted? No, but it got there,” the aforementioned House Republican critical of the budget resolution said, referring to the February showdown over the chamber’s framework.
“This is a far cry from that,” they added. “It’s all tax cut, no spending cut, meaning the math doesn’t math.”
As the stalemate drags on, some House Republicans are floating other paths beyond trying to muscle the measure through the lower chamber, including sending House and Senate lawmakers to a conference committee to hash out their differences on the blueprints.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the influential conservative chair of the House Judiciary Committee, advocated for that track during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning, according to Norman, a prospect that is unlikely but, nonetheless, underscores the discontent among deficit hawks.
The Speaker, for his part, says leaders and the administration are working on a resolution to the impasse.
“It’s looking to be a combination of commitments and assurances between the White House and all the leaders in both chambers,” Johnson said. “But we’re working on that.”
Alex Gangitano contributed.