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WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to bring in the big gun last week — President Trump — to pressure House Republican holdouts last week into passing one of the largest tax cuts in US history.
“There were many points in the final couple of weeks where the entire thing appeared that it would fall apart,” Johnson told The Post in a phone interview Friday, before touting Trump’s influence.
“He’s the ultimate dealmaker. He literally wrote the book on it. So when he speaks, people listen, and that’s been a great benefit to us.”
The nearly $4 trillion budget reconciliation package — which will avoid a massive tax hike next January and make Trump’s 2017 individual rate cuts permanent if passed in the Senate — was the culmination of a year’s work with 11 committee chairs but wrapped up in the last 48 hours before a vote following high-stakes, round-the-clock negotiations with the Republican conference’s so-called “Five Families.”
“I think it was Vince Lombardi that said, ‘Victory loves preparation,’ right?” Johnson paraphrased. “It required a long thoughtful plan, and that’s what we did.”
Deals struck with blue-state Republicans for a $40,000 state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, a White House showdown with fiscal hardliners in the Freedom Caucus and a final agreement implementing rescissions of green-energy tax credits and other cuts to Medicaid helped the speaker send the legislation to the Senate.
Sources with direct knowledge of the White House and 11th-hour speaker’s office meetings before the changes said Trump’s “colorful” rhetoric was key, with one noting how holdouts recognized “the gravity of that moment when the most powerful man on the planet knows you’re the problem.”
“Don’t blow this opportunity,” the president fumed in the meeting held in the cabinet room of the executive mansion. “Get it done.”
Johnson and he deployed something of a good cop-bad cop dynamic initially, though the speaker became far more “forceful” in the hours before the final vote, with one source saying it became “very clear early on that the time for negotiation was over.”
“I know about their districts to a granular level,” the speaker said Friday of his colleagues, adding in his understated way: “It was certainly a dialogue.”
The “tooth-and-nail fight,” as one source put it, came after the initial budget blueprint didn’t account for potentially costly expansions to Medicaid and failed to chip away at hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for solar and wind items approved under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Those additions later had to be written into a manager’s amendment, which was placed on the bill as it was moving through the House Rules Committee, run by Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) for more than 20 hours straight to get the bill to the floor in the early hours of Thursday morning.
“If they gave something to the moderates, they had to give something to the conservatives,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who’s been in touch with Johnson’s team since the Louisiana Republican was unanimously elected to the speakership in October 2023.
“The Freedom Caucus in the end said, ‘OK, we don’t like it on principle but you’ll get us a few more spending cuts. We’ll live with it.’ It was a great victory for … cheerful persistence.”
Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) was the only lawmaker to vote “present” on the bill, adding later in a statement that he was still hoping for more cuts to end “waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.”
Sources noted that some plan now to “continue fighting this in the Senate,” with one claiming “there is gnashing of teeth among the wind and solar lobby right now and they are going to be descending on Congress and the White House” to pull back some of the changes before it reaches Trump’s desk.
“It is undeniably true that we held out and got massive reforms,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who was part of the discussions told The Post. “I think the Senate needs to do an even better job. The things that we got; we’re going to fight to keep — I mean hard.”
White House officials and many Republicans have telegraphed optimism about the final product’s more than $1.5 trillion in spending reductions along with tax relief and deregulatory provisions being enough for 2.6% year-over-year economic growth and increased revenue — averting the up to $3.8 trillion deficit hike projected by independent budget analysts.
Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have been panning the measure as a “scam” giving tax breaks to billionaires while ripping health care coverage away from millions of Americans — and some Republicans also think the growth projections are a pipe dream.
“It’s not fiscally responsible,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of two Republicans who voted against the bill. “Moody’s changed the bond rating for the United States. … The markets responded. US Treasury’s at 5% now for a 30-year note.”
“I’m concerned about my children, my grandchildren and the fact that we are stealing from them,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) vented Thursday. “$37 trillion in debt and we’re gonna add to it as Republicans? That is unacceptable, and that’s why there’s no way I’m going to vote for this bill in its current form.”
Beginning in March 2024, the House speaker and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) met with committee chairs to hash out a reconciliation bill they believed Trump would sign after winning back the White House.
Things got more complex in the following months as the Budget Committee sought to balance spending and revenue levels in the legislation — and the former president floated new items on the campaign trail like eliminating taxes on workers’ tips and overtime pay.
“With each new promise [from the president] … we needed to fulfill it,” Johnson said. “The load got a little heavier, but we went to work and got the necessary parties involved.”
Sometimes the “delicate balance” of pacifying the Republican factions made it seem like he was “crossing the Grand Canyon on a piece of dental floss,” he said he told GOPers in a Senate luncheon last week.
In between Election Day and Inauguration Day, the speaker also began losing lawmakers from his narrow House majority to admin posts. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik was even withdrawn from consideration as US ambassador to the UN to ensure Republicans would have enough votes.
Stefanik’s return to the House — which averted a potentially prolonged special election for her upstate district — ended up proving crucial: Republicans voted the reconciliation bill through the House by a single vote, 215-214.
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