House Republican hard-liners vowed to deprive Speaker Mike Johnson of the needed votes should he try to force party’s domestic policy megabill through the House overnight — just before Johnson ordered votes to move forward.

The ultimatum came after House Freedom Caucus huddled among themselves following hours of negotiating Wednesday with GOP leaders, who had said they were making progress with the holdouts and planned to grind forward with a vote. If enough Freedom Caucus members withhold their votes, the “rule” — the procedural measure providing for final floor consideration of the megabill — will fail.

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert indicated she’s sticking with her fellow Freedom Caucus members on any rule vote.

“Not tonight,” she said, before several of the hard-liners huddled again, this time in Johnson’s office.

President Donald Trump had a different view: “It looks like the House is ready to vote tonight,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “We had GREAT conversations all day, and the Republican House Majority is UNITED, for the Good of our Country, delivering the Biggest Tax Cuts in History and MASSIVE Growth. Let’s go Republicans, and everyone else – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Johnson indicated earlier Wednesday he planned to move forward with votes, and members were advised around 9:20 p.m. that he would stick to that plan and dare the holdouts to oppose Trump, as some in his leadership circle have been counseling.

House Republicans are taking up legislation that violates the budget framework they painstakingly in the spring. It’s not the end of the world for the megabill.

That’s because the majority almost always rules in the House, and lawmakers there are free to renege on prior agreements if they have the votes.

That likely means it’s curtains for the agreement brokered this spring by fiscal hawks, led by Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), who insisted on a mechanism tying the amount of tax cuts in the GOP megabill to the total amount of spending cuts.

But the sprawling domestic policy legislation that Senate Republicans sent to the House violates that mechanism. If Speaker Mike Johnson plows forward with the Senate plan, as he intends to do, any House member could theoretically raise a “point of order” pointing out that the legislation doesn’t adhere to budget adopted by the House.

There’s a catch: Unlike the Senate, which requires 60 votes to waive a budgetary point of order, the House can waive the procedural challenge with a simple majority.

Prompting a standalone vote on that waiver, however, would illustrate in broad daylight how House Republicans are simply ignoring their own framework, which was a product of months of negotiations between the far-right House Freedom Caucus, fiscal hawks on the House Budget Committee and Republican leadership.

Senate Republicans piled on far more tax cuts in their version of the megabill and likely didn’t include as much aggregate spending cuts as the House plan. According to one analysis by Andrew Lautz of the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Senate added $560 billion in new tax cuts compared with the House-passed bill. A final tranche of changes to the bill made on the Senate floor Tuesday further cut revenues by $20 billion while increased spending by $90 billion, adding to the fiscal violation.

House GOP leaders aren’t allowing a standalone vote, however. Rather, the “rule” Republican members are being asked to pass setting up final debate of the megabill specifies that the bill is to be considered “without intervention of any point of order.”

In other words: Tough luck, fiscal hawks.

Republican holdouts on the Senate-passed version of the party’s “big, beautiful bill” are huddling with House GOP leaders, who are holding open a vote to move the legislation forward as they negotiate.

The procedural vote remained stuck more than 90 minutes after it was first called. Seven Republicans have yet to vote, and several of them are gathered in a room off the House floor where Speaker Mike Johnson and other top leaders have been shuffling in and out.

Placating those hard-line fiscal hawks could be the final test of whether Republicans can send the massive domestic-policy bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before his arbitrary July 4 deadline.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said his fellow holdouts on the megabill are deciding between “voting it down and sending it back [to the Senate] or getting our questions answered from the White House and supporting it.”

He added that discussions surround “what the administration can do” to implement the Senate bill in ways that would assuage the concerns conservatives have put forth.

White House budget director Russ Vought arrived at the room around 3:45 p.m. to walk through how the White House could find future spending cuts and how the administration plans implement the policies in the megabill — especially around rollbacks to federal food aid and clawbacks of clean-energy tax credits.

A key GOP holdout, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he was “trying to go through the bill and understand it” after railing against a number of the Senate’s changes.

“I will note that I have now gotten a little bit more information on some of the Medicaid stuff that I feel like it’s a little bit better than I originally anticipated, but I still have concerns,” he said, citing “massive reservations about the Green New Scam subsidies and the overall spending levels.”

The Capitol huddle follows meetings earlier in the day at the White House where Trump participated.

“I think all of the momentum is in the right direction,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican who attended some of the White House meetings. “The president did a really good job of noticeably moving members toward ‘yes.’”

There is GOP angst about the Senate’s deeper cuts to Medicaid than were in the bill the House passed weeks ago. There are also concerns from House lawmakers about their districts being able to access funds specifically earmarked for rural hospitals — an issue that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Director Mehmet Oz tried to soothe at a White House meeting earlier in the day.

But the touchiest issue for the hard-liners concerns the additional deficits piled onto the Senate bill, which includes significantly larger tax cuts and additional spending, including the hospitals fund. They are accusing Mike Johnson of violating a budget agreement that stipulated any additional tax cuts would be offset with new spending cuts.

“There were just a lot of promises they’re not living up to,” said a House Republican granted anonymity to describe the sensitive talks.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a Freedom Caucus member, said he thinks they will be able to “work something out” to clear the bill on Wednesday, but the path for that is not year clear.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the only reason the vote was being held open for multiple hours was to accommodate lawmakers whose travel plans back to Washington were disrupted by thunderstorms.

“We need their votes, and they’re going to be here shortly and so when they get here within the next hour, we’ll come back, finish this vote, then go straight into the rule vote,” said Scalise.

But after two of the waylaid GOP members, Pennsylvania Rep. Dan Meuser, and Florida Rep. Neal Dunn, arrived and voted — giving leaders enough votes to move forward — the vote was instead held open as negotiations with the final holdouts continued.

Benjamin Guggenheim, Lisa Kashinsky and Calen Razor contributed to this report.