As a procedural vote to start floor debate on the GOP megabill stretched on Wednesday night, several MAGA world figures went online to threaten the Republican holdouts.

Hard-right lawmakers have objected that the bill increases deficits and does not sufficiently cut subsidies for clean energy and wanted more time to amend the bill. But top allies of President Donald Trump were having none of it.

Longtime Trump aide Jason Miller described the vote on whether to advance the procedural legislation as a simple choice between Trump and the Democrats. Trump’s top strategist on his 2024 campaign, Chris LaCivita, chimed in echoing the brusque message:
Top White House aide Stephen Miller demanded Republicans “stand with Trump” and show loyalty to the president who had been persecuted by “the communist left” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said anyone who is voting advancing the bill is voting against all of Trump’s tax pledges from the campaign, including one — “no tax on Social Security” — which is not technically in the bill.

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.