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On Tuesday evening, it looked like Donald Trump’s agenda would face its first major setback.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had called for a vote on a budget resolution to allow lawmakers to pass the “one big, beautiful bill” the president seeks with an increase in defense spending, border security and increased energy exploration alongside extending the tax cuts that Trump signed in 2017.
But it looked like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got the better of him. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, who had just given birth three weeks ago, flew in from Colorado to block the bill. Florida’s Frederica Wilson, who had frequently missed votes, showed up, as did Rep. Kevin Mullin of California, who had been recovering from a blood clot after surgery.
Tim Burchett, the avuncular conservative congressman from Tennessee who had been a holdout, gave a fistbump to Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride. As reporters waited for Johnson, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “We’re interrupting a funeral.”
But the budget resolution was barely in the ground when Johnson pulled a miracle resuscitation as Burchett as well as Reps. Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Warren Davidson of Ohio all flipped, and the resolution passed.
But now comes the hard part. The resolution isn’t the actual policy. Rather, it’s simply the parameters for the policy Republican lawmakers want to pass. In recent weeks, the Senate and the House have gone back and forth on who will pass their bill first.
The big divide has been whether the Senate, which wants to approve two bills that will deal with the tax cuts later, would pass before the House. The Senate passed its bill last week, but House Republicans believe passing this will give them the upper hand.
“This is important for the House so that the House can actually be in the driver’s seat,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told The Independent before the whipsaw vote.
Last week, Trump seemed to side with the House when he said he preferred their approach. But the upper chamber does not take too kindly to being told what to do. And White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters before the vote that Trump would review both proposals.
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is up for re-election in North Carolina, said that Republicans needed to reauthorize the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the 2017 tax cuts that Trump signed his first year in office.
“The voters will absolutely reject Republicans for failing to fulfill that promise, period,” he told The Independent. The tax cuts, one of Trump’s sole legislative accomplishments during his first term, will expire at the end of this year if Congress does not act.
Trump, of course, promised a number of other tax provisions on the campaign trail, ranging from no taxation on tips, overtime or Social Security. He also wants to fix the cap on state and local tax deductions that the 2017 bill put in place to pay for some of the other tax cuts.
“But we also, at the same time, have to work on meaningful debt reduction and spending reform, so it’s a lot of work so that we can get done in reconciliation,” he said. But some of it is going to take tough work and get bipartisan support.
On top of that, the legislation calls for the House Energy & Commerce Committee to find $880 billion worth of cuts. This has led some to worry that this will affect Medicaid, the health care program for low-income people and people with disabilities, which is within the jurisdiction of Energy & Commerce.
“Regardless of what happens moving forward in this budget process, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of House Republicans want to cut Medicaid, they want to gut Medicaid,” McBride told The Independent before the vote.
Some Republicans don’t deny that they want to see the federal government take action on Medicaid. Rich McCormick, who last week saw plenty of constituents voice their anger about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in his bright-red district in Georgia, said he wanted to see the federal goverment get its hands off Medicaid.
“The more we can push down the state level, the less waste, fraud and abuse,” he told The Independent. ”So you’re much more accountable at the local level than we are at the federal level.”
But Democrats aren’t the only ones worried about cuts to Medicaid. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has fashioned himself as a populist pro-labor Republican, said he did not want to see Medicaid reductions.
“Work requirements, fine,” he told The Independent. But he noted how large chunk of his state is on Medicaid or the Children Health Insurance Program (CHIP). “People rely on these things, and they’re working folks. I think we better be really careful there,” he emphasized.
Trump for his part said during his interview with Musk on Fox News that Medicaid would not be affected. That makes it harder for Republicans to navigate lest they be seen as violating a pledge by their party’s leader.
Trump has never been one to get into the weeds of policy details. That means that Republicans will go into the negotiations on this bill with little direction.
If done the wrong way, it could lead to either a bill that fails, or one that serves as a live grenade for Democrats to use against the GOP come 2026.
