WASHINGTON — Two weeks after he cast a decisive vote to pass a sweeping domestic policy bill that cuts Medicaid by about $1 trillion, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill to repeal some of those cuts.
“Now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect,” Hawley said in a statement.
It sparked mockery from the normally mild-mannered Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who posted on X: “Just so I’m clear… he’s introducing a bill….to repeal the bill… he voted for….two weeks ago?”
Hawley said he feared the party’s megabill would cause long-term harm if the Medicaid cuts are fully implemented, but still voted for it because it will deliver more hospital money for Missouri in the first four years.
“You can’t get everything you want in one piece of legislation. I like a lot of what we did. I don’t like some of it,” he told reporters after unveiling his own measure on Tuesday.
The move represents a trend in Congress during President Donald Trump’s second term. Republican lawmakers across the ideological spectrum keep casting votes in favor of bills even while warning that they’re deeply flawed and may require fixing down the road. In some cases, lawmakers explicitly threaten to vote “no” on bills before eventually folding and voting “yes.”
It isn’t unusual for lawmakers to back legislation they call imperfect. But this year, that contrast has become more stark. It comes as Trump has solidified his grasp over the GOP base, resulting in lawmakers growing increasingly leery of crossing him and risking their political futures.
Nowhere has that dynamic been more pronounced than with the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, whose members have repeatedly threatened to oppose bills before acquiescing under pressure from Trump. With Trump’s megabill, they complained about red ink: It’s expected to add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“What the Senate did is unconscionable,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said in a Rules Committee meeting, vowing that “I’ll vote against it here and I’ll vote against it on the floor.” He ultimately voted for that bill, unamended, after conservatives were told Congress would consider future bills to lower the debt.
In the House, a faction of swing-district Republicans voted for clean energy cuts in the “big, beautiful bill” while voicing their hope that the Senate would undo them. That didn’t happen, and nearly all of them voted for the legislation regardless.
Across the Capitol, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, cast another key vote to approve the megabill, she said she “struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country, when you look to Medicaid and SNAP,” and called on the House to make changes. They didn’t. The House passed it as written and sent it to Trump to become law.
“Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests,” Murkowski told NBC News after the Senate vote earlier this month.
“But I know, I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that,” she added.
In another case, Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., who represents a battleground district with a high share of Medicaid recipients, threatened to vote against the entire Senate bill if it maintained the steeper cuts to the program.
“I will not support a final bill that eliminates vital funding streams our hospitals rely on, including provider taxes and state directed payments,” he said in a statement, urging the Senate to “stick to the Medicaid provisions” in the earlier House version of the bill; “otherwise, I will vote no.”
Valadao’s request was ignored. Five days later he voted for the Senate bill when it returned to the House, securing final passage. (His office didn’t respond to queries about the contradiction.)
In the end, just three Republicans who expressed concerns about Medicaid voted against the bill: Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who had just announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, as well as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick R-Pa., who are set to face tough races in next years midterms.
And Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who consistently voted against the megabill throughout the process over deficit concerns, is now facing the threat of a Trump-backed primary challenge.
A similar trend occurred on the $9 billion package of spending cuts to NPR, PBS and foreign aid that passed Congress this week and was sent to Trump’s desk. In the run-up to the votes, multiple Republicans expressed serious concerns with the substance of the bill, its deference to the executive branch and the damage it could do to bipartisan dealmaking on government funding if one side can undo the parts it doesn’t like on a party-line basis.
“I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret. Some second and third order effects. And I suspect that when we do we’ll have to come back and fix it,” said Tillis, before voting in favor of the bill.
Tillis told NBC News that he was “trying to have a positive view about how this rescission is going to be implemented” and that if he’s unsatisfied it will change his attitude to future rescission bills.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chair of the Armed Services Committee, said he was troubled that Congress wasn’t detailing which programs were cut and deferring to the White House.
“It concerns me — as perhaps approaching a disregard for the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch under Article I,” said Wicker, who voted for the bill. “And in this situation it will amount to the House and Senate basically saying: We concede that decision voluntarily to the executive branch.”
