Punchbowl News: “After months of preliminary jockeying, now comes the really hard part – drafting a bill. Johnson’s challenges in juggling concerns from the center and right of his conference over spending cuts this morning underscored just how difficult it’s going to be. Then throw in the tax portion of the package and you have an enormously complex Rubik’s Cube to solve.”
“House Republicans have set a Memorial Day goal for the reconciliation bill, so they’ll want committees to move quickly to put pencil to paper and move toward markups. But they have to bridge some very serious internal political and policy gaps.”
“Just think about this: HFC members and other conservatives touted this morning that Johnson committed to them he’ll cut $1.5 trillion in federal spending and adhere to tying the House Ways and Means Committee’s $4.5 trillion in room for tax cuts to achieving $2 trillion in spending reductions. But Republicans worried about deep Medicaid cuts said Johnson reassured them during the vote. Making both groups happy may very well be impossible.”
Politico: “That process will pit fiscal hawks against moderate Republicans as GOP leaders try to square their conflicting demands to protect safety-net programs like Medicaid while cutting trillions of dollars from that slice of the federal budget.”
