The Obscuring Is The Point

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is barreling ahead with his plans to hold a vote on House Republicans’ budget blueprint Tuesday evening, despite the fact that at least two House Republicans have said they will oppose the measure, making its chances of passing questionable at best. (And, in a meta sense, despite another, much larger issue — that President Donald Trump’s administration does not seem to care about or recognize Congress’s authority over the federal budget.)

Vulnerable House Republicans have been publicly and privately expressing their concerns with the budget resolution — the blueprint for Trump’s “big, beautiful” fiscal agenda — which the House Budget Committee put forth earlier this month. The plan calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the course of the next decade (some of that will include extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy), cutting $2 trillion in federal spending and raising the debt limit by $4 trillion. To get to that $2 trillion in federal spending reductions, the budget resolution directs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to identify $880 billion in ten-year savings.

Importantly, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over federal funding for health insurance, including Medicaid. That’s why this is the portion of the plan that has Democrats and vulnerable Republicans in districts Trump lost or barely won sounding the alarm (mostly privately when it comes to moderate House Republicans, though more than a handful have expressed their concerns publicly). While the panel has “the broadest jurisdiction of any authorizing committee in Congress,” according to House Energy and Commerce Democrats, advocates and experts have been saying for weeks that the budget resolution’s directive to the panel implies that Medicaid is most firmly in crosshairs — in part because Trump has said he doesn’t want Medicare touched. Per HuffPost:

The document doesn’t specify exactly what programs to cut. But analysts say the clear implication is that Republicans are looking for deep reductions in programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, both of which serve low-income Americans, given the GOP ruling out cuts to Medicare or Social Security.

The House Speaker has been responding to concerns within his conference about the budget resolution’s targeted focus on gutting Medicaid with a few key rhetorical twists.

First, by centering work requirements (which, in effect, is a mechanism for kicking people off Medicaid), elevating the GOP talking point about weeding out supposed “fraud” within the program and in turn obscuring how much adding work requirements and weeding out fraud will actually amount to in terms of cuts. Some experts suggest that in order to hit the targeted spending reductions, the House Energy and Commerce Committee may propose eliminating federal funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, among other things.

But if centering work requirements (reducing Medicaid rolls) doesn’t give vulnerable House Republicans in his conference the rhetorical cover they need to vote with the party this week, Johnson has also tried to obscure the proposed cuts to Medicaid by playing dumb. In remarks to reporters on Monday, Johnson said that there is “nothing specific about Medicaid in the resolution,” which is literally true, but a completely unserious evaluation of the resolution. As TPM has previously reported, the committees charged with coming up with the largest federal spending reductions are the very committees tasked with creating budgets for Medicaid and nutritional programs for low-income Americans. It’s muddy by design. Per Politico:

Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday that he isn’t planning to make any changes to his budget plan to placate Republicans concerned about possible Medicaid cuts.

“No,” Johnson replied when asked if he would offer any concessions to those members, some of whom he’s planning to meet with later Monday.

“Look, everybody needs to understand that the resolution is merely the starting point for the process,” Johnson said. “So there’s nothing specific about Medicaid in the resolution. The legislation comes later, so this is the important first start.”