Dem
47
GOP
53
Before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) rammed through the House's version of the budget bill this week, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) was one of at least four holdouts—enough to kill the bill. After the initial vote was canceled, Donald Trump got on the phone with Spartz. After that phone call, Spartz announced that she had received "assurances" from Trump about Medicaid, and that she was now a "yes" vote. Not long thereafter, the bill passed the House with zero votes to spare.
We did not believe Spartz' account of events for one second. First of all, assurances from Donald Trump are not worth the paper they are not written on. Second, the main point of the House bill is to cut Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. Even if Trump's assurances were to be trusted, he cannot possibly give an assurance that Medicaid will be spared. Spartz, unlike some of her colleagues, is not an idiot. Surely, she knows all of this.
That said, other than the smell test, we had no evidence that Spartz was not telling the truth, and so we decided not to call her a liar when we wrote the news up. Now, however, we do have evidence. Trump not only gave Spartz a dressing down during their phone call, he did it so loudly that his screaming could be heard by people in the House cloakroom, at least 20 feet away. He told the Representative that she is a fake Republican who is undermining his agenda, and that he would make sure that everyone knows it if she did not get on board. And despite having declared to colleagues, earlier in the day, that she was inflexible on this matter, she did indeed bend to Trump's will.
This confirms what everyone should have known, namely that Trump is more than happy to resort to blackmail in order to whip votes. Spartz very nearly quit Congress last year, so she's clearly not as attached to her job as most members are. We would guess that an element of Trump's message, whether it was presented directly or as subtext, is that it was not only Spartz' career that was on the line, it was also her personal safety.
Sometime in the next 2 weeks, we'll learn exactly how effective such tactics are. The Senate is not happy with the House bill, and says big changes will be needed. Those changes may be unacceptable to some House Republicans who voted "yea" on this week's bill. Further, Spartz and the other Republicans who surrendered to Trump knew that they were only voting on vaporware, and not on a final bill. They may proceed differently once their vote actually matters, presidential threats or not. On Tuesday, we probably thought it was 75% the Republicans would manage to get a bill done in time to avoid a shutdown on March 15 (the current budget runs out at midnight on March 14). Now, we'd say it's more like 50/50. (Z)