As the fate of President Trump’s agenda hung in the balance in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) turned to what he knows best: prayer.
At the end of an hours-long, late-night meeting that came after Johnson was forced to scrap a key vote Wednesday night, the Speaker, a devout Southern Baptist, led a group of hard-line conservative holdouts and members of leadership in a benediction for the conference to reach a solution and to receive guidance from God to do the right thing for the country, two sources in the room told The Hill.
The next day, his prayers would be answered.
House Republicans on Thursday adopted the Senate’s framework to advance Trump’s domestic policy priorities, officially kick-starting the process the party will use in its effort to enact tax cuts, border funding and energy policy.
Johnson, with the help of Trump, had managed to win over more than a dozen conservatives who had spent a week railing against the legislation and insisting there was little that could change their minds.
It was the fourth time Johnson has pulled off a nail-biter — following his reelection as Speaker in January, the adoption of the House’s budget blueprint in February, and passage of a government funding bill in March — muscling the measure through his razor-thin majority with no votes to spare.
On Thursday, Johnson took a victory lap.
“I want to compliment our president, President Trump, who is always engaged with us. He didn’t have to call a single member to wrangle anybody on this thing,” Johnson told reporters after the vote. “He allowed me the space to do what I needed to do, and we got the votes together, and we reaffirmed our commitments. It’s real. We want to find real savings.”
But the process came with its usual share of drama, including a scrapped vote, entreaties from the White House, long meetings in the Capitol and tensions flaring on the House floor.
‘DEAD ON ARRIVAL’
The path to Thursday’s successful vote was an uphill battle from the start, with fiscal hawks quickly — and loudly — taking issue with the different level of spending cuts it requires of each chamber. The legislation directed House committees to find at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, while Senate panels were directed to slash at least $4 billion in federal spending — a fraction, in comparison.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Hill in a text message last Thursday, a day after the resolution was unveiled, that the framework was “DEAD ON ARRIVAL.”
And it was not just those on the right flank incensed by the blueprint. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), the chair of the House Budget Committee, piled on, saying in a scathing statement that the legislation was “unserious and disappointing.”
Johnson and other GOP leaders tried to quell the early uprising.
In a letter to House Republicans on Saturday they argued that the different sets of instructions “in NO WAY prevents us from achieving our goals” in the final bill. On a Sunday conference call, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) sought to assure House Republicans they wouldn’t get jammed by the Senate numbers, according to a source on the call.
But by the time lawmakers returned to Washington on Monday, more than a dozen Republicans had voiced opposition to the resolution — far more than the mere three GOP defections that leaders could afford to lose on the vote with full attendance.
Johnson attended a Freedom Caucus meeting Monday night to try to come up with a path forward — as did a trio of liaisons from the White House who all have former ties to the hard-line conservative group: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, Deputy OMB Director Dan Bishop, and White House Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid.
While the always-sunny Johnson left the meeting saying it was a “great conversation” and “very positive,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) had a much more dismal readout: No progress, he said.
‘He’s just not going to change my mind about this’
The fiscal hawks and hard-liners were pitching steps that would add days, if not weeks, of work before the House could rubber-stamp the resolution.
Harris suggested skipping a vote approving the Senate resolution altogether and having committees move to crafting legislation and cuts. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the Judiciary Committee and a Freedom Caucus co-founder, was among those advocating for the House and Senate to go to a conference committee to hash out differences on the resolution.
Leaders hated the idea of any delays killing the momentum. So they turned to a tactic that has helped sway holdouts on previous votes: a meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon with Trump.
But in a stunning act of defiance for a stated supporter of the president, Harris said he declined the invitation — and that personal appeals from the president would not solve the impasse.
“There’s nothing that I can hear at the White House that I don’t understand about the situation,” Harris said. “Let the president spend time with people whose minds he might change. He’s just not going to change my mind about this.”
Those who did attend that meeting said that Trump vowed to encourage the Senate to embrace steeper cuts, while lawmakers tossed around other ideas like an amendment to ensure the cuts would happen.
Trump, though, was more focused on pressuring the House members — tearing into the holdouts at a fundraiser dinner for the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday night.
“You just gotta get there,” Trump, donned in a bow tie, said in a speech to the members. “Close your eyes and get there. It’s a phenomenal bill. Stop grandstanding. Just stop grandstanding.”
The pressure helped, according to one leadership aide — but holdouts remained.
A smoke-filled room and a prayer
Leaders scheduled a vote on the resolution for around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday — but there was skepticism that it would happen.
Johnson and Scalise were still searching for ways to assure the fiscal hawks that the ultimate bill would achieve serious cuts.
At one point, a group of the fiscal hawks marched across the Capitol to Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) office, where they pressed the Senate leader for more information on the amount of spending cuts that would be included in the ultimate Trump agenda bill.
When the vote series started, it was clear that leaders did not yet have enough support. Johnson huddled on the House floor with a large group of the holdouts, leaning over from the aisle to speak to Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), who appeared frustrated, wagging his pointer finger.
Johnson went back to huddle with Scalise, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and leadership staff. Then, in a line, those holdouts followed the Speaker out of the chamber and into a ceremonial office off the House floor, where they continued those conversations outside the public eye.
The air around the House chamber grew thick with cigar smoke as other Republicans, having nothing better to do while they waited around for the vote to either proceed or be pulled, gathered in cigar-lover House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole’s (R-Okla.) office next door to the meeting — putting a twist on the stereotypical “smoke-filled room.”
But after holding an unrelated vote open for more than an hour to buy time, Johnson made the call to yank the planned vote on the resolution.
Johnson said he had spoken to Trump while the meeting was underway, but the Speaker opted to talk to the president privately rather than on speakerphone because “there was just too many voices, too many people in the room.” Johnson said he gave Trump an update on the situation, and that the president was “very closely monitoring all of this.”
After scrapping the vote, Republican leaders and hard-liners met late into the night, at times raising their voices so loud they could be heard by reporters camped out in the hallway. The group ran through a number of ideas, according to a source, none of which would be a silver bullet to breaking the stalemate.
They discussed adding language to the rule for the budget resolution that said the House would not consider the final bill unless it included at least $1.5 trillion in cuts, but hard-liners did not like how that was nonbinding. They floated amending the actual resolution with similar language, but moderates had already balked at such a prospect. And they raised the possibility of going to a conference committee so both chambers could hash out their differences, which would drag out the process leaders were trying to fast-track.
The group, after Johnson’s prayer, left the meeting without a strategy.
“We have a pretty well-developed playbook and it’s got a number of plays in it and I just haven’t made the call on which one it is yet,” the Speaker told reporters on his way back to his office at around 10:30 p.m.
The press conference heard ’round the Capitol
By Thursday morning, after the holdouts’ meetings with Thune and House GOP leadership proved to be unpersuasive, Republican leaders hatched another plan: have the Senate GOP leader take his message public.
Just after 9 a.m., Johnson and Thune staged a press conference in the Capitol designed to convince the House holdouts that Senate Republicans were serious about steep cuts — the same idea that failed to resonate the evening before.
Their audience was not only the public, but members of the Freedom Caucus who were huddling behind closed doors across the street, in the Cannon Office Building, watching the show and devising their response. Johnson, when the press conference ended, phoned in to the conservatives’ meeting, according to Norman.
The dam of resistance began to break.
While Thune stopped short of committing to the $1.5 trillion minimum in cuts mandated under the House bill — he said it was the Senate’s “ambition” to hit the House number, without offering any guarantees — the mere mention of the higher figure was enough for holdouts to soften their opposition.
While Thune offered softer language in public, one source familiar with the matter told The Hill that he was bolder about his spending cut intentions behind the scenes, which appeared to fuel satisfaction among the group.
In another gesture, Johnson sent a letter Thursday morning to the conservative holdouts, promoting the importance of enacting Trump’s agenda and promising that the final bill would be “a fiscally responsible product that fulfills our collective promises to the American people.”
And the Freedom Caucus said the White House also “committed to historic spending reductions” — including targeting “waste, fraud, and abuse in the expanding Medicaid program.”
Even as the vote began on the House floor, Johnson and other GOP leaders huddled with the holdouts one last time in the Speaker’s vestibule just off the House floor. The conservatives emerged from the room and marched, in a single file, the short distance to the chamber floor, where they all voted in favor of the bill they had lambasted all week.
Frustrations in the fallout
In a sign of the tenuous nature of the reconciliation process to come — and the House GOP conference at large — Johnson huddled with moderate lawmakers on the floor for a long time as the vote went on, reassuring the group that the conference would approach Medicaid in a “compassionate” way, a source told The Hill. Centrists have been concerned that the $1.5 trillion in cuts would prompt cuts to social safety net programs.
And in a symbol of the tense process, friction within the conference began to spill out into the public view.
One member expressed frustration about leadership “capitulating” to the Freedom Caucus: “It’s appeasement — not peace through strength!”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) briefly voted no before switching to yes in what he said was a symbolic “shot over the bow” at the House Freedom Caucus, pledging to “personally sabotage every single thing the Freedom Caucus does until they get their mind right.”
The fiscal hawks said that their change of tune came only after strong promises from leaders in the House, the Senate and the White House.
“We have now three strong statements from the Speaker, the president and the Senate majority leader,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), flanked by other hard-liners, told reporters after the vote. “We did not have those 48 hours ago. We do now.”
Still, the two Republicans who voted against the budget bill — Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Victoria Spartz (Ind.) — were left unconvinced. They said their colleagues, by approving the Senate framework, had not only been sold a bill of goods, but had also set the stage for “the biggest deficit increase in the history of Congress,” in the words of Massie.
“The people who traded their vote for a promise, I think that’s just salve for their conscience,” the Kentucky Republican said. “They were probably … looking for an off-ramp, because what was coming next was a lot of pressure from the president to vote for this.”
“The only piece of paper that matters is the piece of paper we voted on. And if it ain’t in what we voted on, it ain’t gonna happen,” he added. “[Thune] said there are a lot of senators that support cuts; he didn’t say there were 51 senators who support cuts.”