Hardline conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus looked more like members of the Fealty Caucus on Thursday after a rebellion among the party’s spending hawks melted away in the final hours and the House passed the legislation known as the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” on Thursday.
President Donald Trump wins, while just about every wing of the GOP congressional caucuses suffered an embarrassment in some form or another (except maybe the leadership).
The Freedom Caucus was the last faction to face down its foe and blink. The group’s members circulated a three-page memo to members of the GOP caucus over Wednesday decrying the Senate-passed version of “One Big, Beautiful Bill” as a betrayal of the framework Speaker Mike Johnson had agreed to.
It was an all-encompassing retreat. Rep. Ralph Norman left the White House this week with a three-point plan he said GOP leaders could implement to get his vote to a “yes”. He received none of those concessions — no one did, as the House passed the version of the bill sent back from the Senate. Amending the bill in any way would have sent it back to the Senate before it reached Trump’s desk, endangering the July 4 deadline that members in both chambers blasted as arbitrary.
“I can’t vote yes just because everybody says we got to get it done by July 4th,” Rep. Chip Roy said in an interview this week. He then did so, explaining in a Twitter post that he received “assurances” from the White House that the administration was preventing Medicaid fraud.
Another far-right Republican, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, grew irate this week when questioned whether the caucus was just following Trump’s marching orders.
“The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment. We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay?” he barked at a reporter. He’d later go on to snipe at The Independent for a “bulls***” question about a vote being held open for hours while Trump and the leadership brought the holdouts into line.
They aren’t the only ones who folded, to be clear. Sen. Lisa Murkowski was a potential “no” vote in the Senate, who sharply criticized the legislation and fretted about the real world effects that new work requirements would have on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, in multiple comments to reporters after passage of the bill on Tuesday.
Murkowski told reporters, after voting for the bill, that she hoped the House would amend the legislation and send it back to the Senate for more work, suggesting that Republicans blow past the president’s deadline. But it was her very refusal to hold out for those changes that guaranteed they were kept out of the bill when Speaker Mike Johnson called everyone’s bluff at once.
Instead, Murkowski (and others) secured a $50bn fund aiming to prevent rural hospitals from closure, and some Alaska-specific carve outs that earned her the label “cheap date” from one senior Democratic congressman.
In the end, Republicans folded. They know they folded. And they are none too happy to have that fact pointed out.
Roy spent the afternoon after the House vote retweeting his defenders, who insisted that the Freedom Caucus had not “caved”. “Constantly threatening to vote against bills and then voting for them makes Roy/Freedom Caucus folks highly mockable, but they have used this tactic to substantially push the bill to the right”, read one backhanded compliment retweeted by the Texas congressman.
Norman summed it up cleanly in his own statement: “…at the end of the day, I’m standing with the president.”
Andy Harris, chair of the caucus, has failed to release a clear explanation for his own flip-flop by Thursday evening. He, too, was retweeting the group’s X boosters but only after retweeting the caucus’s statement bashing the bill. On his website, Harris’s most recent statement about the legislation declared: “We want to be crystal clear: if the Senate attempts to water down, strip out, or walk back the hard-fought spending reductions … achieved in this legislation, we will not accept it.”
He told The Hill on Tuesday afternoon: “The final package at the end of the night was very different from what we started with in the morning.”
It was not clear how; no amendments were passed.
Even the SALT caucus, in the end, voted for legislation that sees the cap on state and local tax deductions return to the current rate by the end of the decade, a blow to their efforts.
Republicans will argue otherwise, but the president’s insistence on the bill’s timely passage and the very public failures of just about everyone involved to keep their word will make this bill a very difficult task for GOP members to campaign on, especially in primary season when the most politically engaged voters make up the electorate.
The only real clear winners here are Johnson — who defied expectations again and cemented his speakership likely through Trump’s presidency — and the president himself, who now gets to play with more money for his mass deportation scheme than he’s ever had access to before.
