Washington – President Mike Johnson, R -La., Muscled a revised budgetary plan necessary to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda in the house on Thursday, beating a conservative rebellion that threatened to sink the measure one day earlier.
Razor-Thin’s count was 216-214, with only two Republicans-the representatives Thomas Massie, R-Ky., And Victoria SPARTZ, R-Ind. – Join all Democrats in opposition. Trump had approved the budgetary plan, which the Senate adopted last weekend during a close vote of 51-48.
“It’s a good day in the House. I told you not to doubt us,” said Johnson to journalists after the vote. “We are really grateful to have had the big victory on the ground earlier. It was a big, very important. “
Johnson suddenly eliminated a budgetary vote on Wednesday evening after him and the conservatives of conservatives huddled in private for more than an hour from the house, but failed to reach an agreement. The discussions continued that evening and Thursday morning, when there seemed to be a breakthrough in the dead end.
Shortly before the vote, Johnson appeared alongside the head of the majority of the Senate John Thune, Rs.D., during a rare joint press conference and confidence. The fiscal conservatives of the Chamber, including several managers from the Freedom House caucus, had promised to vote on the budget unless they obtain guarantees of deeper spending reductions.
Johnson said that leaders were “determined to find at least 1.5 billion of dollars in savings for the American people” – a figure stated in the budgetary framework of the original chamber which seemed to conquer many selected. The budgetary plan adopted by the Senate had asked a minimum of only $ 4 billion in expenditure discounts, to which the conservatives have laughed and led to the deadlock.
“Our first large and magnificent set of reconciliation here implies a certain number of commitments, and one of them is that we are committed to finding at least 1.5 billion of dollars in savings for the American people while preserving our essential programs,” Johnson told journalists.
Thune, who welcomed several of the Républicains of the House in his office on Wednesday evening, said that the Senate was “aligned on the Chamber with regard to what their budgetary resolution described in terms of savings”.
“We have to do something to bring the country into a more sustainable tax path, and that involves taking a hard scrub from our government to determine where we can find these savings,” said Thune. “The speaker has spoken of a billion dollars and a half. We have a lot of American senators who believe that it is a minimum, and we will certainly do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious on this subject.”
The successful voting on Thursday in the House is only the first stage of a long process of “reconciliation” to complete the agenda of Trump to spend billions of dollars in tax reductions and hundreds of billions of dollars of new expenses for the application of immigration and military expansion. The budget orders the relevant committees of the room and the Senate to start working on the details of these efforts, while identifying specific savings to pay them.
Republicans also want to use the package to increase the debt ceiling up to 5 dollars.
The passage of the budget represents a major victory for Johnson, Thune and Trump, as well as the legislators should leave for a planned two -week recreation.
But the approval of the budgetary resolution was supposed to be the easy part. In the coming weeks, the committees will undertake the politically intimidating task of identifying specific cuts without alienating moderate republicans who protect the government programs to which their voters count.
For example, the budgetary document directs House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction on Medicare and Medicaid, to find $ 880 billion in expense discounts to help pay the package.
We do not know how legislators will achieve these economies without targeting these popular law programs. But Johnson reaffirmed Thursday that Trump and the Republicans will not touch on the advantages of the Americans and have declared in the past that they would go after fraud and abuse in these programs.
Democrats “have said that we are going to interrupt Medicaid; this is not true. We will protect the advantages to which everyone is legally entitled, the beneficiaries who have a legal right to what it will be preserved. These are essential security queues programs that the Republicans support,” said Johnson.
“The president said-social security, health insurance, Medicaid will not take a hit,” he added.
Massie, one of the two republican votes “no”, shot some of the conservatives who fell back at the last minute and supported the budgetary plan. He suggested that they should not have trusted the leaders of the GOP that they would follow higher expenditure cuts in the reconciliation package.
“I hope it works for people who exchanged their vote for a promise,” said Massie. “They were probably, perhaps, looking for a ramp out of the ramp, because what was going to follow was a lot of pressure from the president to vote for it.”
Unlike other recent critical votes, where Trump had to call the legislators on the room floor in order to travel the votes, the president was not necessary this time to conclude the agreement.
“He did not have to call a single member to struggle on this thing,” said Johnson. “It allowed me to make the space to do what I have to do, and we made the votes.”
But Trump has always applied the pressure this week. He met on Tuesday a group of selected in the White House and pushed the Republicans to vote in favor of the budgetary plan in the articles on his social media platform Truth Social.
“Congratulations to the Chamber for the adoption of a bill which opens the way to one of the largest and most important signatures in the history of our country. Among many other things, it will even be the biggest tax and regulatory reductions never envisaged,” published Trump on Thursday after the vote.
