Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday that a House vote on the Senate’s budget blueprint will proceed later in the day, as scheduled, and that GOP leaders will ultimately secure enough Republican votes needed to pass it.
“I believe we will — eventually we will,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “I think it’s gonna pass today.”
A number of House conservatives have balked at the budget resolution, which was crafted by Senate Republicans to shepherd the major pieces of President Trump’s domestic agenda — including expanded tax cuts, more oil drilling and a crackdown on immigration — into law.
The GOP critics have favored a House-passed version of the budget, which mandates much steeper spending cuts than the Senate’s plan, and want greater assurances that they won’t get jammed with the upper-chamber’s lower numbers later in the debate. The push-back has created a huge challenge for Johnson and his leadership team, who are scrambling ahead of Wednesday’s vote to rally the holdouts behind the bill.
They have little room to play with. If four Republicans defect, the resolution would fail, striking a sharp blow to Trump’s agenda amid the heat he’s already taking from his tariff policies, which sparked a stock-market selloff late last week.
Johnson said he’s sympathetic to the conservatives’ argument.
“Their concerns are real,” he said. “They really want to have true budget cuts and to change the debt trajectory that the country is on.”
A large part of the lobbying campaign, Johnson said, is convincing the conservative holdouts that Senate Republicans are committed to major spending cuts, despite a budget plan that requires the upper chamber to cut only $4 billion from federal program — a microscopic fraction of the $1.5 trillion in cuts the House has been tasked with locating.
“Sometimes there’s a lack of trust in these institutions between the two chambers,” the Speaker said. “But I’m trying to assure my colleagues that we have it on good faith with the Senate that they’re committed to this as we are, and that we can protect essential programs — and cut unnecessary fraud, waste, abuse and other savings in the government — that will make it work better for everybody.”
Lending a huge boost to Johnson’s effort, Trump has jumped into the debate in recent days in an effort to rally the critics behind the bill. On Tuesday, he hosted a meeting with a number of conservatives at the White House. That evening, he used the podium at a prominent GOP dinner to urge the “grandstanding” critics to get on board.
But a number of holdouts said they remained opposed to the measure, even after hearing Trump’s appeals.
Johnson said he spoke with Trump Wednesday morning, and the president is ready to help whip the vote further.
“The president’s willing to help — he’s told me that this morning,” Johnson said. “But I think we get this job done.”
The House vote on the Senate-passed budget is scheduled for 5:30 p.m.