Washington-two weeks after issuing a decisive vote to approve an internal policy bill that cuts Medicaid in approximately $ 1 billion, Senator Josh Hawley, R-MO., Introduced a bill to repeal some of those cuts.
“Now is the time to prevent future Medicaid cuts from entering into force,” Hawley said in a statement.
He made fun of the normally modern senator Chris Coans, D-Del., Who published in X: “I’m just clear … He is presenting a bill … to repeal the bill … voted for … Two weeks ago?”
Hawley said he feared that the Megabill of the game would cause long -term damage if Medicaid cuts are completely implemented, but still voted for it because he will deliver more money from the hospital for Missouri in the first four years.
“You can’t get everything you want in a single legislation. I really like what we did. I don’t like part,” he told journalists after presenting his own measure on Tuesday.
The measure represents a trend in Congress during the second term of President Donald Trump. Republican legislators throughout the ideological spectrum continue to cast votes in favor of bills, even while warning that they are deeply defective and may require fixing the way on the road. In some cases, legislators explicitly threaten to vote “no” in the bills before eventually fold and vote “yes.”
It is not unusual for legislators to support the legislation they call imperfect. But this year, that contrast has become more marked. It occurs when Trump has solidified his understanding on the basis of the Republican Party, which turned out that legislators grew more and more resorting to crossing it and risk their political future.
Nowhere that dynamic has been more pronounced than with the ultraconservator of the House of Representatives of the House of Representatives, whose members have repeatedly threatened to oppose the bills before accepting Trump’s pressure. With Trump’s Megabill, they complained about the red ink: it is expected to add $ 3.3 billion to the national debt for 10 years, according to the Congress Budget Office.
“What the Senate did is excess,” said representative Ralph Norman, RS.C., at a meeting of the rules committee, promising that “I will vote against here and vote against her on the floor.” Finally, he voted for that bill, without age, after conservatives were told that Congress would consider that future bills would reduce debt.
In the Chamber, a faction of the Republicans of the Swing district voted for clean energy cuts in the “Big and beautiful bill” while expressing his hope that the Senate would get me down. That did not happen, and almost everyone voted for legislation independently.
On the other side of the Capitol, after Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaaska, cast another key vote to approve the Megabill, said “he fought powerfully with the impact on the most vulnerable of this country, when you look at Medicaid and Snap,” and called the camera to make changes. They did not. The camera approved it as written and sent it to Trump to become law.
“Do I like this bill?
“But I know, I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans who are not going to be advantageous by this bill. I don’t like that,” he added.
In another case, the representative David Valadao, Republican of California, who represents a battlefield district with a high proportion of beneficiaries of Medicaid, threatened to vote against the entire Senate bill if he maintained the most pronounced cuts in the program.
“I will not support a final bill that eliminates vital financing flows in which our hospitals trust, including provider taxes and state -led payments,” he said in a statement, urging the Senate to “continue with the provisions of Medicaid” in the previous version of the representation chamber; “Otherwise, I will vote not.”
Valadao’s request was ignored. Five days later he voted for the Senate bill when he returned to the camera, ensuring the final passage. (His office did not respond to consultations on the contradiction).
In the end, only three Republicans who expressed concern about Medicaid voted against the bill: Senator Thom Tillis, Rn.C., who had just announced that he would not seek re-election, as well as Senator Susan Collins, R-MAINE and representative Brian Fitzpatrick R-PA., Which would face difficult careers in the coming years.
And the representative Thomas Massie, Republican of R-Ky, who constantly voted against the Megabill throughout the process for deficit concerns, now faces the threat of a primary challenge backed by Trump.
A similar trend occurred in the Expenditure cuts package of $ 9 billion to NPR, PBS and foreign aid that approved the Congress this week and was sent to the Trump desktop. In the period prior to the votes, multiple Republicans expressed serious concerns with the substance of the bill, their deference towards the executive branch and the damage that could be made to bipartisan treatment about government financing if one side can undo the parties that do not like them in a base of the party line.
“I suspect that we are going to discover that there are some things that we regret. Some effects of second and third order. And I suspect that when we do it we will have to return and fix it,” Tillis said, before voting in favor of the bill.
Tillis told NBC News that he was “trying to have a positive vision of how this termination will be implemented” and that if he is not satisfied, he will change his attitude towards future termination invoices.
Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of the Miss., President of the Armed Services Committee, said he was worried that Congress did not detail which programs were cut and differed to the White House.
“I am worried, as perhaps addressing a contempt for the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch under article I,” said Wicker, who voted for the bill. “And in this situation it will be equivalent to the Chamber and the Senate basically saying: We grant that decision voluntarily to the Executive Branch.”
