Mike Johnson Panic-Spirals as Republicans Revolt Over Trump Budget

It doesn’t appear that the president’s “big, beautiful bill” will muster enough votes in time.

Donald Trump has imposed a July 4 deadline on Congress to pass his signature legislative item, but actually meeting the due date has sent Republicans into disarray.

By late Wednesday afternoon, House Speaker Mike Johnson had already laid bare that the process would make lawmakers, and presumably their constituents, unhappy.

“All of us have to give up on our personal preferences,” Johnson told reporters. “That’s what I think people are recognizing and coming to grips with.”

The House Freedom Caucus had released a three-page memo earlier Wednesday heavily criticizing the Senate’s version of Trump’s exorbitantly expensive tax cut, flaming the Senate draft for adding pork where the House had proposed cuts. In their complaint, they advocated for more extreme slices from the federal budget.

But the hard-line fiscal conservatives aren’t the only party members opposing the bill: Moderates are worried about the high cost the legislation will have on safety-net programs, including some $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and swing-district Republicans are worried about political backlash in their Democrat-led states.

Any of these groups have the muster to keep the bill from passing: Johnson can afford to lose just three votes if he wants to push the bill to the president’s desk.

By the afternoon, some lawmakers had gone public with their complaints about the fiasco.

“We aren’t delayed because moderates whose constituents will be completely screwed are holding out,” posted Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell. “We are delayed because the most extreme members who want to hurt MORE people are holding out.”

Texas Representative Chip Roy, the policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus, told NBC News that the bill was not “totally exciting” for his conference and that he wasn’t sure if the bill would pass by the end of the week. He added that the half-trillion dollars in savings would have to come from somewhere else in the federal budget, though he wasn’t committed to ironing out the details in this package.

Congress is not supposed to be at the mercy of the president: The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution to isolate three separate systems of government, intended to continually check one another’s power. But that has not been the case since Trump resumed office with a conservative majority in both legislative chambers as well as the nation’s highest judiciary. Instead, month after month, the federal government has seen lawmakers bend and capitulate to the president’s will, buying into his “mandate from the people” spiel, even when his policies cause direct harm to their constituents.