FLASH: Late Sunday night three conservatives changed their vote to "present" to keep the bill moving.
President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is so close to the finish line in the House that the President and his team can almost smell the ink on it. So, when five House conservatives refused to vote for the version of the bill the House leadership put together howls of rage emanated from the White House.
The President wants the bill done NOW various Trump surrogates from the administration and shills on social media said as they blasted the holdouts, “grandstanders” was perhaps the only printable epithet applied to these principled conservatives by Team Trump.
But all the insults hurled at the conservative holdouts beg the question, “Are Republicans really trying to reform government and drain the swamp, or are they doing a deal just to do a deal?”
Five Republican members—Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Josh Brecheen (Okla.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), and Lloyd Smucker (Pa.)—voted against the legislation.
Smucker said he supports the bill but voted against it as a tactical parliamentary move to allow the committee to reconsider it – a common practice by leadership when it looks like one of their bills will go down.
There are a number of policies in the bill that have prompted opposition from principled conservatives, one of the most obvious is raising the SALT (state and local taxes) deduction cap.
Blue state Republicans from places like New York, California and Illinois want the cap raised from the current $10,000 to $30,000 or more.
“[If you] raise the SALT cap from [$10,000] to [$30,000] to whatever, pay for it,” Rep. Ralph Norman told reporters minutes ahead of the budget committee vote.
Rep. Chip Roy wrote on social media platform X that a change to the SALT cap amounts to “subsidizing blue state high-tax jurisdictions.”
“If they want that, then I want the reforms to Medicaid,” Roy wrote.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) is among the SALT-aligned moderates who have also taken issue with expansive cuts to Medicaid.
She told The Epoch Times on May 15 that she expected a deal to emerge on SALT, she gave no details on what such a deal might look like.
Another sticking point for conservatives has been Medicaid reform.
Once again it is Blue State Republicans who are resisting the reforms necessary to rein-in the bloated program.
Moderate Republicans such as Malliotakis have opposed large Medicaid cuts amid fears of an electoral backlash in 2026.
Republicans have said that their changes to the program would merely make illegal immigrants ineligible for Medicaid, prevent fraud in the program, and impose stricter requirements on nonworking adults seeking benefits.
“Democrats are exaggerating about the Medicaid impacts of the House GOP reconciliation bill,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) wrote on X on May 13. “The truth? We are strengthening Medicaid for children, mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly—for whom the program was designed.”
Some Republicans have said Medicaid measures will bring pain to their supporters.
“There’s a lot of cuts in there to Medicaid. They will hurt our people ... working class people,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said before the vote on “Steve Bannon’s War Room.”
Trump has consistently said that neither the bill nor his administration will adversely affect Medicaid for U.S. beneficiaries.
“[The bill] will kick millions of Illegal Aliens off of Medicaid to PROTECT it for those who are the ones in real need,” Trump wrote in his pre-vote Truth Social post.
The current bill does not implement work requirements until 2029, a scam on taxpayers that conservatives have vowed to oppose, even if it brings down the bill.
Republicans have also differed over the timeline for eliminating energy-related subsidies from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, reported the Epoch Times.
Principled limited government constitutional conservative Rep. Ralph Norman told reporters amid negotiations that he wants to see those programs “end now.”
The current bill phases out Green New Deal electricity production and generation credits after 2028. Certain production credits for wind energy would be eliminated starting in 2027, while some others would end at later dates. Many credits would be repealed after 2025.
Midway through negotiations on May 16, Rep. Josh Brecheen described the recent growth of solar energy on the grid as a concern. He cited information from the Energy Information Administration, which found that 61 percent of new capacity on the U.S. grid in 2024 came through solar power, and warned of China’s solar manufacturing dominance.
“We are displacing U.S. jobs by outsourcing to China,” he said, predicting that lobbyists would seek to extend green energy credits further in a few years.
Rep. Brecheen’s point is well taken. You can’t run a steel mill off a windmill and subsidizing solar and other renewables conflicts with President Trump’s reindustrialization policy, which requires robust baseload energy from fossil fuel or nuclear energy to work.
We get that some of the most vulnerable members of the slim Republican majority represent districts in high tax states and see raising the SALT deduction as important to their reelection, but we don’t see the same political imperative for keeping some of the other Democrat policies, such as Medicaid with no work requirement for able-bodied adults and the billions in Green New Deal scams flowing to Democrat-aligned donors, corporations and NGOs.
We urge CHQ readers and friends to stand by House members such as Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Josh Brecheen (Okla.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), and Ralph Norman (S.C.) who are standing for the conservative principles that Republicans run on yet rarely deliver. The Capitol switchboard is (202-224-3121), we urge CHQ readers and friends to call their Senators and Representative TODAY to demand they cut the funding for Democrat Green Energy scams, reinstate work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients and follow through on the other spending reforms that were promised as part of the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
- Big Beautiful Bill
- Freedom Caucus
- Conservative Holdouts
- Rep. Chip Roy
- Art of the Deal
- Josh Brecheen,
- Andrew Clyde,
- Ralph Norman,
- Lloyd Smucker (Pa.)
- Committee Review
- SALT tax
- Blue State taxes
- Medicaid cuts
- illegal immigrants eligibility
- Rep. Ken Calvert
- Senator Josh Hawley
- Energy subsidies
- Work requirements
