House Republican leaders canceled a vote on the Senate’s budget resolution Wednesday night, as Speaker Mike Johnson came to terms with what had been clear for many hours: Too many Republicans would vote in opposition and the measure was bound to fail.
House GOP leaders continued to meet with holdouts late Wednesday and are considering tweaks to get fiscal hawks on board with the budget framework essential to passing President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. But the outcome is a brutal blow for House GOP leaders and the president, who have spent days trying to wrangle the votes for the fiscal blueprint.
The canceled vote followed hours of suspense, as more than a dozen holdouts met off the floor with Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise while a vote on a completely separate measure was held open for well over an hour. The evening votes had already been delayed as the House hard-liners were busy back-channeling with Senate Republicans to sketch out deeper spending cuts.
“I just got off the phone with President Trump. And he wants us to get it done. But we’re going to rework things,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters as she left the meeting with House leaders that prompted the decision to call off the vote.
Johnson told reporters there was a “small subset” of Republican lawmakers opposed to the measure, which Republicans need to adopt in order to unlock the filibuster-skirting power to enact a package of tax cuts, military spending, energy policy, border security investments and more along party lines this year. But even a handful of opponents can sink a partisan bill given the House GOP’s exceedingly narrow majority.
“I’m very optimistic about the outcome of this ‘one big, beautiful bill,’ and this is just one of the steps in getting there,” the speaker said.
Johnson said House leadership will explore either amending the Senate-adopted budget or going straight to conference with the other chamber and working out differences there. One option is adopting an amendment from Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) that would ensure Republicans have to enact corresponding spending cuts to offset any tax cuts in a final package. Another option is forcing a level of certain spending cuts in the package.
Lawmakers are slated to head back to their districts Thursday for a two-week recess, meaning that the president may have to wait to see any forward motion on his “big beautiful bill.” But Johnson told reporters Wednesday night that “if we have to come back next week, then we’ll do that.”
Some Republicans are holding out hope there could be a breakthrough before lawmakers leave for their time at home, though. Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia, one of the GOP lawmakers opposed to the Senate’s budget framework, told reporters Wednesday night, “I think we’ll have a more conservative alternative tomorrow.”
Adoption of identical budget resolutions in both the House and Senate is an essential step to allowing committees to start drafting and passing the party-line package. And if the House amends the Senate’s revamped budget framework, senators would have to endure a third all-night amendment voting session just to approve the budget, before holding another voting spree to pass the final bill.
Across the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader John Thune wasn’t enthused about that idea. “No we can’t do that — another vote-a-rama that drags it on indefinitely. I think everybody realizes that we’re at the time that we’ve got to move,” he said.
The Senate majority leader also met with a group of House fiscal hawks earlier in the evening about their concerns in an attempt to break the impasse and have them approve the Senate’s product, afterward describing the confab as “a really good back and forth” and “constructive.”
“All we can do is make sure they understand where we’re coming from and how closely we want to work with them to get to the final product,” Thune told reporters Wednesday night.
Thune said he didn’t make any commitment to enacting $2 trillion in cuts to safety-net programs in the final bill, however, which some House fiscal hawks are insisting on: “I didn’t say anything quite like that.”
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who was also in the meeting with the fiscal hawks, sought to project unity: “Republicans in the Senate, Republicans in the House, are all on the same page — we are all committed to serious and significant savings.”
But many House Republicans are not at all pleased with alterations made in the Senate, where GOP leaders are calling for a total of at least $4 billion in savings in a final package, while the House set a mandate of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts to balance out tax cuts.
“We just don’t trust the Senate,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, said in a brief interview this week. “It just seems very unserious that they want to control the deficits in this country.”
Jordain Carney, Mia McCarthy and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
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