Subject: Re: Trade deal with UK reached
If they cut Medicaid - which they’ve said they won’t do, the only people talking about curing Medicaid are democrats - THEN they’ll have a political problem.

They have to reduce Medicaid spending. That's a given. What they're trying to do is find ways to reduce the amount of spending on Medicaid while being able to plausibly deny that they're cutting Medicaid. They're having a hard time doing that, because moderate Republicans aren't going along with the rhetorical sleight-of-hand (and some are constrained by red-state trigger provisions on Medicaid expansion).

They’ll negotiate something.

Well, not exactly negotiation - more like capitulation. Johnson has apparently given up trying to get to the $2.0 trillion in spending cuts. They're going to aim for $1.5 trillion. He's bowing to reality. Which means that one of the things you thought would happen (they wouldn't reduce the tax cut package and they would be permanent) is now officially dead. The tax cut package has to also shrink, and a fair number of the provisions will have to be temporary:

Speaker Mike Johnson told House Republicans behind closed doors Thursday that he is pursuing $1.5 trillion in spending cuts as part of the GOP’s party-line megabill, resulting in a smaller tax cuts package of $4 trillion.

https://www.politico.com/live-...

And of course, it's not a certainty that they'll find a way to make that package work. Only having a $4 trillion tax cut package means that the caucus will have to pick and choose some of the priorities (again, the SALT caucus wants their proposed tax cuts in there, along with everyone else). The moderates still might balk at the measures to reduce spending on Medicaid and food stamps.

Dropping the spending cuts by a quarter is also going to piss off the hardcore conservatives in the Freedom Caucus no end, who already didn't trust Johnson to follow through on the cuts that they had been insisting on in order to get their votes. Relying on temporary tax cuts again will irritate the budget hawks, who know full well that "temporary" tax cuts are always permanent.

It's going to be hard for them to square the circle, which is why they need Trump to have a lot of political capital in order to make this happen. Someone's going to have to tell the SALT Reps, the moderate Reps, and the budget hawk reps to all vote for the bill even though they'll all have something they deeply hate about it and would otherwise not vote for it.