Congress
GOP leaders prepare to squeeze hard-liner holdouts
House Speaker Mike Johnson, with backing from the White House, is making plans to muscle through the GOP’s domestic-policy megabill Wednesday, with top Republicans seeking to quickly quash a last-minute rebellion from conservative hard-liners.
The plans for a quick vote were described by three senior Republicans involved in the closely held negotiations who were granted anonymity to discuss them. They have developed amid rising frustrations on the hard right over a key tax deduction sought by blue-state Republicans and what they consider to be a walk-back of an agreement overnight on other concessions they have been seeking.
Several of the GOP hard-liners emerged from a late-morning meeting dismissing Johnson’s plan of passing the megabill through the House by Memorial Day, saying that substantial negotiations remained over issues such as Medicaid, clean-energy subsidies and other issues.
Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who leads the House Freedom Caucus, said the holdouts had “accepted the White House’s offer last night,” referring to a handshake deal to speed up Medicaid work requirements and the phase-out of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, but then said their concerns had been “inadequately” addressed by House GOP leadership. He cast doubt on passage of the bill Wednesday.
“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” he said.
Another key holdout, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, cited “progress” but said “there’s a long way to go.”
But top Republican leaders and President Donald Trump, whose policy agenda is embedded in the roughly 1,100-word bill, are in no mood to wait. They have grown frustrated, the senior Republicans said, that the ultraconservatives have shifted their demands after closing in on a deal late Tuesday evening.
And they are concerned, with the upcoming holiday weekend, that the GOP will have member attendance problems is the vote pushes much past Wednesday night.
The dispute is set to come to a head Wednesday at a 3 p.m. White House meeting where Trump and Johnson are expected to pressure the hard-liners to come to a deal. “It’s going very well,” Trump told reporters Wednesday morning. “We’re very close.”
Johnson’s leadership team is tracking roughly a half-dozen hard holdouts. But they believe they will be able to force through a procedural vote and final passage of the megabill, with potentially three defections. The holdouts, for now, are privately threatening to tank the procedural vote setting up final floor debate on the bill.
A key holdup is that the conservatives are continuing to push for deeper changes to Medicaid, the safety-net health program currently serving nearly 80 million Americans. The pending bill implements new work requirements for some beneficiaries, and leaders have discussed speeding up implementation by two years to placate the holdouts.
But Republicans involved in the talks say the hard-liners are pushing for more. They want to reduce the federal share of some Medicaid costs, known as FMAP, and to further limit the use of provider taxes in states that expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act by lowering the so-called safe harbor rate from the current 6 percent to 4 percent.
GOP leaders are drawing a hard line in negotiations against further changes to Medicaid, citing their own members wariness about pursuing deeper cuts and Trump’s own reticence to to slash health care benefits. “Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” he told lawmakers in a closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday.
Also infuriating the conservatives is a tentative deal leaders reached Tuesday night with a group of blue-state Republicans to boost the cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction to $40,000. Conservatives have strongly opposed further increasing the SALT cap.
Harris cited the agreement in an early morning Newsmax interview Wednesday: “I think actually we’re further away from a deal because that SALT cap increase, I think, upset a lot of conservatives,” he said, adding that “conservatives are pushing for some balancing spending reductions.”
Around that time, a person with direct knowledge of the talks who was granted anonymity to describe them candidly said “there is currently a zero percent chance this thing moves today,” saying leaders “walked away from a deal last night and even rolled back progress made over the weekend.”
In a brief interview Wednesday morning before the meeting with Harris, Roy and others, Johnson said “there is a chance for a vote today.”
Harris said in the Newsmax interview that hard-liners stopped negotiating just before midnight Wednesday, saying there was a deal but it was “pulled off the table.” He suggested that the deal would make further cuts to Medicaid and take more aggressive action to pull back on Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for clean energy development, saying those two issues are “pretty essential” to get his support.
“This bill actually got worse overnight,” Harris said. “There is no way it passes today. … We may need a couple of weeks to iron everything out.”
Johnson can afford to lose only a few GOP votes ahead of a potential House floor vote Wednesday. The House Rules Committee is debating the legislation, which is expected to be amended before it makes it through the committee Wednesday. It’s not clear when that will happen.
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee said he’s not willing to “accept bad results” as a tradeoff for the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence — a direct rebuttal to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“As someone who practiced health care for 28 years, I’m never willing to accept bad results. I think we just need to do our best,” Rep. G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters Monday.
He was responding to Altman’s comments to Decoded by Blue Light News that people “should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Pressed further on whether he agreed with Altman’s premise, Thompson replied, “No, I think we have to work harder to prevent any bad things from happening.”
Altman’s comments come in the wake of increased panic over the risks of catastrophic destruction from AI, with many industry leaders and experts arguing that guardrails are needed on the technology to prevent it from spinning out of human control.
Pressure is building on Congress to regulate the rapidly-advancing technology, but lawmakers are divided over whether the AI industry needs federal regulation or if it’s capable of governing itself.
The executives of major AI labs and tech companies gathered at the White House last week to discuss solutions with President Donald Trump, who believes overregulating AI will have national security repercussions. The group ended up signing a “morally binding” AI accord that critics say won’t do enough to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Thompson noted Monday he believes that AI will bring “tremendous solutions,” specifically in regards to finding cures for health issues like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But he also said AI has to be led with “principle” — comparing it to how he addressed digital assets in a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, which he worked on as chair of the Agriculture Committee.
“The first principle is ‘do no harm.’ So we need to protect consumers, and that means, I think, building some guardrails — some guidelines — to do that,” Thompson said. He added that the second principle is to “foster innovation.”
“I think AI has a lot to do with that,” he added. “I don’t think AI works without RI: Real Intelligence.”
LE SUEUR, Minnesota — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is no “consensus” yet on advancing a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time even as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Republicans to pass it.
Thune addressed the matter in a Monday interview after Trump used his Truth Social account multiple times over the weekend to rail against the legislation, known as the Sunshine Protection Act — going so far as to post the personal cell phone number of one of its GOP opponents, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“The president feels strongly on it like he does a lot of issues,” he said. “It’s something we’re having conversations about but there’s no clear path forward or consensus on it yet.”
While Trump singled out Cotton for scrutiny, Thune made clear the opposition to the permanent daylight saving time proposal — which would lead to very late winter sunrises in some parts of the country — ran deeper than one senator.
Cotton has publicly voiced opposition to the proposal for year, citing, among other things, the fact that children in his state would be going to school in the dark for part of the year.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voiced similar objections Monday to reporters in the Capitol, saying he was mindful of “safety concerns in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus in very early hours.”
Thune, who spoke during a campaign swing in Minnesota with GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya, has himself opposed previous daylight saving bills. He said Monday that “a lot of it depends on where you are in the country” and that “your geography probably has as much to do with your position on that as anything.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has aligned himself closely with Trump, is among the lawmakers who have been pushing to get the bill through the Senate. He recently told POLITICO, “I’m going to make sure it gets passed this year.”
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Democrats have pulled back some of their ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, days after the top Senate Republican super PAC paused its future spending in the state.
WinSenate, a group affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, has removed roughly $1.1 million in North Carolina ad buys this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The group still has roughly $18.8 million in future reservations through Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing this race through to victory, and will continue to make spending decisions based on how to best build a strong Senate majority,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.
The move, combined with the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund’s decision to pause future spending, are a signal that both parties are shifting resources amid an ever-expanding Senate map. Democrats are increasingly confident in their North Carolina Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, as he continues to hold a sizable lead in public polling over Republican Michael Whatley — but some privately say states like Michigan and New Hampshire need more resources.
Meanwhile, multiple Republican groups, not just SLF, have retreated from the state in recent weeks, effectively deciding that it’s no longer worth the money to boost Whatley’s campaign.
The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action left North Carolina off its $22 million list of future spending across key Senate contests, and Old North Action removed $6.5 million in ad reservations last month.
The Cooper campaign, however, is still treating the race as competitive, pointing to North Carolina’s closely divided electorate and the fact that President Donald Trump won the state in each of the past three presidential elections.
“North Carolina is a truly 50/50 state and Democrats haven’t won a US Senate race in 18 years. We can’t take anything for granted or our eye off the ball,” said Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to the Cooper campaign. “DC is broken and we’re going to continue to run this race like we’re ten points down to ensure North Carolinians get the change they desperately need.”
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