Speaker Mike Johnson pitched Senate Republicans on the House’s megabill plan Tuesday. Not all of them were swayed by the overture.
Multiple GOP skeptics came out of the lunch meeting saying they planned to continue pushing for further changes to the party-line domestic policy bill — the latest sign that the bill’s challenges don’t end in the House.
“Exactly what he has told the media and his conference is what he told us,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters after the meeting. “The fact of the matter is, though, that we’re not just solving this problem. What good is having the majority if we don’t use it to return to pre-pandemic level spending?”
Mike Johnson, according to GOP senators who attended the lunch, cautioned Senate Republicans against making a significant rewrite of the House’s plan. He characterized parts of the plan, including the $1.5 trillion in spending reductions and the inclusion of a debt hike, as key parameters that Republicans will have to live with.
The speaker, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, “basically said that conservatives just have to live with raising the debt ceiling $5 trillion or $4 trillion, which is an historic amount. And I’m one conservative who won’t live with that.”
The bill is expected to face a litany of changes once it gets to the Senate. There’s a group of GOP senators, including Johnson, who want much deeper spending cuts. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday “a lot of the issue in the Senate will be … does it have sufficient spending reforms.”
Other Senate Republicans are closely watching where House Republicans ultimately land on safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps. Though House Republicans backed away from far-reaching proposals to shift Medicaid costs to states, some Senate Republicans remain concerned about a provision that could affect how states finance their share of the costs.
“I’m concerned with what they’ve got in the bill currently,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said about the House-proposed changes.
Johnson told Senate Republicans Trump was “emphatic” in the meeting to not cut Medicaid benefits. (Trump himself put it in coarser terms, saying Republicans should not “fuck around with Medicaid.”)
But many Senate Republicans said it was unrealistic to expect that the bill would remain unchanged after coming across the Rotunda: “I think most House members understand that when it comes to the Senate we’re going to make changes — hopefully improvements,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said.
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
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