Johnson and Trump pull off surprising win to advance GOP agenda after vote whiplash in the House
Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off a stunning turnaround Tuesday night to rescue a critical vote to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda that had seemed doomed just moments earlier.
Surprising even some of his critics, Johnson and his leadership team capped hours of drama in the Capitol by successfully flipping multiple Republican holdouts to pass a budget blueprint that will mark the first step toward moving Trump’s ambitious agenda forward. With help from last-minute phone calls from Trump, GOP leaders spent all of Tuesday in a furious pressure campaign to win backing for their plan.
“The world didn’t end today. But I do see the edge,” Rep. Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, said of the whiplash in the House.
Republicans had punted the vote Tuesday night only to turn around minutes later to call fleeing members back to the floor to muscle through the plan.
In the end, Johnson lost just a single vote — fiscal hawk Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — which was all he could afford. The Democrats’ whip team scrambled to get near-full attendance on their side: Rep. Brittany Pettersen flew with her 4-week-old baby to make it in time for the vote and Rep. Kevin Mullin, who is recovering from complications from knee surgery, flew with an IV from California.
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But the drama won’t end there: Johnson and his allies acknowledge that what comes next will be much more difficult. Tuesday night’s vote itself was procedural and GOP leaders from the House and Senate will need to agree on how exactly to move ahead with Trump’s sprawling legislative package now that they have adopted divergent plans. The days-long saga over the House budget blueprint laid bare bitter divisions among Republicans that will make it extraordinarily difficult to pass that package in both chambers.
Still, the win comes at a critical time for Trump and Johnson as their party faces crushing deadlines ahead, including avoiding a government shutdown next month and the threat of an economic default later this spring. As with Tuesday night’s vote, navigating those political landmines will require near total unity from the GOP.
GOP leaders will now get to work on exactly what will make it into Trump’s first legislative package. The newly passed House GOP plan calls for sweeping tax cuts, steep spending cuts and a two-year debt limit hike, as well as new money for border security and energy production. The Senate’s plan, however, contains only national security and energy money, while punting on the more contentious items for later.
The stakes are high for GOP leaders: Trump is eager to pass his agenda as quickly as possible, even as party leaders must comply with the extremely strict constraints of the budget powers that allow their party to pass a package without Democratic votes. And Republicans will need to tread carefully on reforms to popular programs like Medicaid, food assistance and Pell grants — concerns that nearly sunk the budget plan this week.
The successful vote capped a dramatic 12 hours for Johnson. In the morning, he held a tense meeting with House Republicans to convince his members to back the budget blueprint or risk forgoing key parts of Trump’s agenda.
But by the afternoon, House GOP leaders were still struggling to lock down the votes, and even the relentlessly upbeat Johnson acknowledged he may need to pull it.
The votes weren’t there around 7:30 p.m., when the speaker moved to scrap plans to hold the vote at all. But then his leadership team — with help from a Trump call to Rep. Victoria Spartz — was able to win over the last holdouts. So, just moments after dismissing members, Johnson called them back to vote and passed the GOP’s budget blueprint.
Rep. Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican, said he decided to change his vote after he received “assurances” of a future plan that could survive the Senate to trim discretionary spending, though he offered no specifics.
And Spartz added that she spoke with Trump on health care issues, saying, “He’s on board to get some great things done on health care. … I trust his word.”
“I think the last few weeks are showing us how difficult it is to move any package through the House,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, a leadership ally, acknowledged earlier Tuesday. “This is a motley crew.”
Hours before the scheduled vote, hardline conservatives insisted there weren’t enough spending cuts in the plan, even as centrist-leaning Republicans remained uneasy about the size of those cuts and whether they could impact popular programs like Medicaid. And Johnson’s efforts to win support even backfired in some corners. Massie said he left a meeting Tuesday morning even more dug in against the budget than before.
“They convinced me in there, I’m a no,” the Kentucky Republican said, holding up a thick packet of leadership talking points and railing against their plans line by line. By the time of the vote, Massie remained the only GOP “no.”
Johnson and his whip team had spent the last several days trying to win over their more moderate members, many of whom had raised concerns that the budget plan could ultimately lead to cuts to the low-income health program Medicaid.
Ahead of the vote, Republicans from northeastern states were particularly wary of plans to cut $880 billion over a decade from federal health and energy programs, which they fear cannot be achieved without cutting Medicaid, the hugely expensive health program, since Trump has vowed not to touch Medicare.
GOP leaders have strongly pushed back against the idea that benefits would be cut, noting that the budget plan is only a framework and not specific policy. They argue there are ways to cut hundreds of billions in wasted money on federal health programs without slashing Medicaid benefits, though it remains unclear where those cuts would come from.
“This is a procedural vote. You tell me what the cuts are,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told CNN when asked about swing seat lawmakers’ concerns about Medicaid cuts.
In the end, Johnson only recorded a single Republican defection.
“We will get there, as we always do,” the speaker predicted earlier in the day, when he was still lacking at least a half-dozen votes.
This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Manu Raju, Alison Main, Morgan Rimmer, Veronica Stracqualursi and Aileen Graef contributed to this report.
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Vote passes 217-215 in win for president as Democrats assail proposal over planned cuts to social safety-net programs
Republicans unified behind a budget blueprint on Tuesday evening, just barely scraping together the votes to advance Donald Trump’s sprawling tax-cut and immigration agenda over unanimous Democratic opposition and widespread concern that it would slash social safety net programs.
But Democrats are warning that the budget will almost certainly result in substantial cuts – an estimated $800bn – from Medicaid, a federal program providing healthcare coverage to more than 72 million Americans. Though the resolution does not explicitly target Medicaid, and Trump has vowed the program would not be “touched,” even some Republican lawmakers have conceded that there are few alternatives to achieve the $880bn-reductions assigned to the energy and commerce committee.
The Nebraska Republican Don Bacon, representing a district that backed Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate in November, has demanded leadership to prove the proposal “won’t overly cut Medicaid”.
Opposition to the House budget resolution has been steadily building over the last few weeks. During last week’s recess, constituent anger over Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net programs as well as Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle the federal government boiled over at town halls and congressional offices across the country.
House and Senate Republicans must now reconcile the differences between the two blueprints. Republicans intend to use a special budget process known as reconciliation, which allows a party that controls both chambers of Congress to pass sweeping policy bills on a simple majority vote, sidestepping the Senate filibuster’s 60-vote threshold.
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The House of Representatives has adopted a resolution that will eventually become a massive multi-trillion-dollar bill full of President Donald Trump’s priorities on the border, defense, energy and taxes.
In a major victory for House GOP leaders, the resolution passed in a 217 to 215 vote.
All Democrats voted against the measure, along with lone Republican rebel Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who was concerned about its effect on the national deficit.
The next step is now for the relevant House committees to meet and build their own proposals, which will eventually be returned into the framework and negotiated into a compromise deal with the Senate.
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Speaker Mike Johnson is advancing a reconciliation bill aimed at Trump’s priorities through the House of Representatives. (Getty Images)
It was a dramatic scene in the House chamber on Monday night as Republican leaders delayed formally ending a vote for roughly 45 minutes as they worked to convince conservative fiscal hawks to support the legislation.
Impatient Democrats called out loud for the vote to be closed as Republicans huddled in varied groups.
Two people on the House floor told Fox News Digital that President Donald Trump got involved at one point, speaking to one of the holdouts, Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., by phone.
Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, could be seen on the phone at other points on the House floor as well, but it’s not clear if they were speaking with Trump.
At one point, House GOP leaders appeared to lose confidence that they had enough support and abruptly canceled the planned vote.
Moments later, however, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were rushing back to the House floor and Fox News Digital was told the vote would be held.
Meanwhile, three House Democrats who had been absent early in the day returned for the Tuesday evening vote in dramatic fashion.
Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., who had a baby roughly a month ago, returned to the House floor with her infant to oppose the bill. And Rep. Kevin Mullin, R-Calif., who was recently hospitalized for an infection, appeared in the chamber aided by a walker.
House and Senate Republicans are aiming to use their majorities to advance Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.
It’s a Senate maneuver that lowers the threshold for passage from two-thirds to a simple majority, but it’s used when a party controls both houses of Congress and the White House because it allows that party to pass its policy goals even under the slimmest margins.
And Republicans are dealing with slim margins indeed; with current numbers, the House GOP can afford no more than one defection to pass anything without Democratic votes if all liberals are voting.
On the Senate side, Republicans can lose no more than two of their own in the reconciliation process.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is waiting in the wings with a Plan B. (Getty Images)
The House resolution aimed to increase spending on border security, the judiciary and defense by roughly $300 billion, while seeking at least $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts elsewhere.
As written, the House bill also provided $4.5 trillion to extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions, which expire at the end of this year.
An amendment negotiated by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, and conservatives on his panel would also force lawmakers to make $2 trillion in cuts, or else risk the $4.5 trillion for Trump’s tax cuts getting reduced by the difference.
The resolution also fulfilled Trump’s directive to act on the debt limit, raising it by $4 trillion or roughly two years.
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The resolution’s odds were touch and go for much of the week so far, since House lawmakers returned from a week-long recess period Monday.
Several fiscal conservatives had demanded more assurances from House GOP leadership that Republicans would seek deep spending cuts to offset the cost of Trump’s priorities.
Republican lawmakers in more competitive districts are concerned some cuts may go too far, however.
The resolution directs the House Energy & Commerce Committee to find at least $880 billion in spending cuts – which those lawmakers fear will mean severe cuts for federal programs like Medicaid.
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Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., pushed back against fears of such cuts during his weekly press conference on Tuesday.
“Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste and abuse. Everybody knows that. We all know it intuitively. No one in here would disagree,” Johnson said. “What we’re talking about is rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse. It doesn’t matter what party you’re in, you should be for that because it saves your money, and it preserves the programs so that it is available for the people who desperately need it.”
It was also supported by a wide swath of Republicans, including conservative Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, a member of the House Budget Committee that approved the bill earlier this month.
“It’s the best bill we’re going to get,” Gill said while praising Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, for his efforts. “If I were writing it then I’d write it differently, but this is the best we’re gonna get it.”
Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, said he was eager to begin working on “cutting taxes for Iowans, securing our border, unleashing American energy production, and eliminating waste and fraud in our government.”
Elizabeth Elkind is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital leading coverage of the House of Representatives. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
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