House Republicans are sending a clear and early warning to their Senate allies as the bill encompassing President Trump’s domestic priorities heads to the upper chamber: Don’t water it down.
House GOP leaders spent weeks in delicate talks with Republican holdouts before cobbling together a fragile agreement that could thread the needle between conservatives’ demands for more spending cuts and moderates’ insistence on a controversial tax break.
As the massive package heads to the Senate, the critical voices of the House debate — blue-state Republicans, hardliners and party leaders — are cautioning their upper-chamber counterparts not to alter their design too severely, or it will never get through the House on its return.
The warnings forecast a coming clash between Republicans in the two chambers, since many senators are already saying they can’t support the package without substantial changes.
House conservatives would be fine with some changes — if they shift the bill to the right with more spending cuts and deficit reduction. At the bare minimum, they’re demanding that the Senate keep in place hard-fought provisions to limit Medicaid eligibility and roll back green-energy subsidies adopted by the Biden administration.
“They’ve got a lot they still need to do to make it better, and they can’t unwind what we achieved. And those are going to be red lines,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). “If the SALT guys think they’ve got red lines, just wait until you see what’s coming out of us.”
