‘A Joke’: Republicans Clash With Each Other Over How Much They Won’t Cut The Deficit

WASHINGTON – Republicans on Capitol Hill are once again fighting each other over what to put in the “big beautiful bill” they want to pass for their leader, President Donald Trump.

Senate Republicans over the weekend adopted a budget resolution that uses accounting gimmicks to hide $4 trillion in deficits, and conservative House Republicans hate it.

“It’s, frankly, a joke from the Senate, and it’s more of the same swamp stuff that we’ve been dealing with for years,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told HuffPost on Tuesday. “We have to draw a line in the sand now on a budget, and the Senate’s budget is not there.”

The House passed its own budget resolution that also would expand deficits, ultimately adding several trillion dollars to the national debt, but not as much as the Senate version, thanks in part to unspecified cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid. Both budgets are striking betrayals of Republican rhetoric about fiscal responsibility.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is pleading with House members to come around to the Senate budget, stressing that the resolution is symbolic and serving only as a framework for yet-to-be-written legislation that would extend the tax cuts Trump enacted in his first term.

“This is the mechanism that we have to advance the Trump agenda in a big way and deliver results to the American people,” Johnson said at a press conference. “All this does is it allows us to continue the process, begin drafting the actual legislation that really counts, and that’s the one big beautiful bill.”

Johnson wants the House to vote on the Senate resolution this week, but he can lose only a handful of Republicans and still win the vote without Democratic help, which won’t be forthcoming. It appears more than three Republicans dislike the Senate budget.

House Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), not someone who typically defies leadership, called the Senate budget “unserious and disappointing” over the weekend, while Roy and others emerged from a party meeting Tuesday saying they remained opposed. Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) called the Senate measure “absolutely unserious.”

There’s a familiar pattern with House Republicans, however, in which several of them announce their opposition to some bill or other and then cave when it’s time to vote and Trump is bearing down on them. Already, they’re being warned not to defy the president.

“Failure in Congress would mean failing Trump and the American people,” Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the No. 3 House Republican, said Tuesday.

It’s not clear if the pattern will recur this week, however.

The White House invited several lawmakers to meet with the president on Tuesday, but House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said he is actually refusing to go.

“There’s nothing that I can hear at the White House that I don’t understand about the situation,” Harris told The Hill newspaper. “It’s not going to help getting enough votes to pass this this week. It’s just there are too many members who are just not going to vote for it, no matter what.”