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G.O.P. Scrambling to Save Huge Bill as Factions Duel
Speaker on tightrope — Demands Reflect Party’s Ideological, Regional and Political Splits
Matt Davis
May 20, 2025
Morning! As usual, we’ll get started after the ads below. ⬇️
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This morning’s lead story by Catie Edmonson opens with a nice tableau.
Diego Valzaquez: The Triumph of Bacchus
Not quite as nice as that, no. In fact it’s a tableau of Republicans gathered at Speaker Mike Johnson’s office last week, trying to agree on Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” to advance his domestic policy agenda. Suffice to say they’re a motley crew, gathered around this particular table, and they don’t have much in common.
There was Representative Chip Roy, the Texas congressman who was insisting the bill include steep cuts to Medicaid. And there was Representative Andrew Garbarino, the New Yorker who has pledged to tank any bill that would reduce Medicaid coverage for his constituents.
Representative Nick LaLota of New York, who has said the legislation’s rollback of Biden-era clean energy tax credits goes too far, was also on hand. So was Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, who is urging Republican leaders to repeal those tax breaks completely.
I don’t sympathize with poor Mr. Johnson, whose job it is to get these guys to all agree, because these guys have something in common, which is that they disagree. It’s like ideological and political whack-a-mole.
For every bloc with one demand that must be met before its members agree to support the measure, there is another demanding the opposite.
Mr. Johnson can afford to lose only three Republicans on the bill, and his predicament helps explain why the legislation faltered in a key committee last week, how difficult it will be for Republicans to push it through the House in time to meet a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline and why — even if they can — it faces an uncertain fate in the Senate.
Politics is messy. Yesterday Britain’s former Prime Minister, serial adulterer and father of illegitimate children and also, defrocked serial liar, Boris Johnson called Britain’s current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, “the orange ball-chewing gimp of Brussels” because Starmer signed a bill making the country’s relationship with Europe more functional, post-Brexit. Johnson may well be planning a return as would-be leader of the Conservative Party but the question is, can his rhetorical charisma persuade people he didn’t party while their grannies were dying during Covid?
Perhaps.
Meanwhile, reading Ms. Edmonson’s piece today suggests Donald Trump does not have an iron fist or dictatorial control over his party. In that sense, the disagreements are deeply democratic as well as being hilariously entertaining to watch. Mike Johnson is eager to portray the disagreements as part of the messy sausage-making of politics, too, and I support his take on things.
“We had a good sampling of the conference in my conference room here for the last couple of hours,” Mr. Johnson said after his meeting with Republican holdouts late last week. “Not everybody’s going to be delighted with every provision in a bill this large, but everyone can be satisfied, and we’re very, very close to that.”
But as the reporter suggests, “That remains to be seen, given the depth of disagreement among crucial constituencies.”
Indeed, reading the story, I’m trying to figure out whether eventually Mr. Trump will need to telephone some of these jokers and persuade them to get in line, or else. Or whether we legitimately could be facing budget paralysis the likes of which voters, of course, would prefer to avoid. I think the price of power is often that you have to sacrifice people and principles. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and so on.
Fiscal hawks have complained that the package doesn’t bring down the “deficit,” and are pressing for new work requirements to Medicaid. They also don’t like that the new bill continues to include a few Biden-era tax credits for clean energy companies. The legislation, as currently written, would add about $3.3 trillion to the “deficit” over the coming decade.
I put the word “deficit” in apostrophes because it’s such a controversial term. Fiscal hawks dislike growing the deficit because it can lead to increased borrowing, higher inflation and potentially lower future investment. Deficits can potentially lower long-term stability. On the other hand electoral cycles in this country are four years long and governments either add to the deficit or cut it down a bit. Nobody’s ever paying off America’s credit card bill.
On the other side of things, swing-district Republicans who might lose their seats are opposing cuts to Medicaid. Right now there’s a lot of Medicaid cuts in the bill:
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation, as written, would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion over that period.
Amazingly there are also Republicans who want the bill to preserve clean energy tax breaks. Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona has emerged as an unlikely proponent of some of the tax credits — they have been a boon to his Tucson-based district, where Lucid Motors, $LCID ( ▼ 1.35% ) expanded its factory expecting to be able to reap the rewards of the law.
“We must ensure certainty for current and future energy investments to meet the nation’s growing power demand and protect our constituents from higher energy costs,” Mr. Ciscomani said in a joint statement with 13 other House Republicans.
Good for you, Mr. Ciscomani. That’s very forward-thinking of you and I like it.
Then there’s an issue with “SALT”, or, “State and Local Taxes.”
Representatives from high-tax states — New York, California and New Jersey — want to preserve their standing in those states by raising the cap on the amount of state and local taxes Americans can write off on their federal returns. The 2017 bill imposed $10,000 limit on that number, but the bill under discussion could triple that to $30,000. Republicans in high-tax states want to lift that cap substantially more. They say their party risks losing its majority if it fails to embrace their demands.
“New York is a donor state, receiving less money back than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue,” Representative Mike Lawler of New York said. “Republicans from blue states such as New York, California and New Jersey were instrumental in delivering the Republican Party its majority in the 119th Congress.”
Damn right. Us wealthy New Yorkers deserve some more tax breaks. After all we subsidize all the states that tend to elect Republicans in the first place.
Conservatives feel differently, arguing that it would amount to en “expensive handout to wealthy residents of blue states.”
[Grabs popcorn.]
The Republican Party
Again, I will say that I support this kind of disagreement in a democracy. You know where there’s rarely public disagreement?
Well, sometimes there are public disagreements.
But they don’t tend to end well, and the stakes are a lot higher. I’d also say “why can’t the Republicans work all this out behind closed doors?” and “surely they realize the damage they’re doing to their party’s reputation by fighting like this?”
But their leader literally endorsed Hitler a few months ago (kinda) and the public don’t care about legislation being written. I expect a few more weeks of this kind of infighting until the consequences ratchet up a bit, and then I do expect it all to die down eventually. Really. It’s this kind of thing that makes people stop reading the newspaper which, as we all know, is actually ultimately in these people’s interests. So.
Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to!
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Sure. Read about this guy who lives amongst the dead at Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. He insists there are “no ghosts” but I don’t believe him.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”