House GOP moderates signal they’ll fall in line with Johnson’s health plan

It’s a time of choosing for a band of vulnerable House Republicans who have long warned about the expiration of key Obamacare subsidies.

Speaker Mike Johnson is barreling toward a Wednesday vote on a health care bill he and other Republican leaders are presenting as an alternative to the tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the month. They have no plans to allow a vote before then on extending the subsidies.

The early signs are that the group of GOP moderates who have voiced concern about their constituents’ health care costs — not to mention their own political futures — is preparing to fall in line this week.

"I haven't seen anything objectionable yet,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said Monday. “For me to vote against it, I'd have to find something objectionable. I wouldn't vote against it in protest."

While he said it would be “a huge mistake” to not include an extension, Fitzpatrick said he votes “for or against legislation based on the merits of the bill.”

Others in the centrist Republican group said much the same privately — that they are still prepared to vote for the GOP health care bill even with their bid for an amendment vote extending the subsidies apparently doomed.

“We’re not going to cut off our nose to spite our face,” said one who, like others interviewed, was granted anonymity to comment on private discussions among the group.

If that sentiment holds, it would be the latest instance of how the group of moderates has largely followed Johnson’s lead in 2025 — voting in lockstep on the party’s domestic policy bill despite objections over Medicaid cuts, for instance, and keeping their names off discharge petitions meant to circumvent the speaker’s control of the House floor.

But the Obamacare lapse represents a particularly acute test for the group at a sensitive moment — after many of them have spoken out publicly.

Rep. Jen Kiggans, a Republican in a highly competitive Virginia district, warned of the political fallout for House Republicans in a closed-door House GOP conference meeting last week. Fitzpatrick and fellow GOP Reps. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania, Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York and David Valadao of California have been involved in efforts to broker an extension of the subsidies, so far to no avail.

It was already virtually assured the enhanced tax credits enacted and extended by Democrats under former President Joe Biden would lapse on Jan. 1, given the Senate’s failure to act last week on a Democratic proposal for a three-year extension.

Forcing a House vote on the matter this week, however, could put additional pressure on Republican leaders to explore a solution next month that would maintain the subsidies in some form for the 20 million Americans who now use them.

But the GOP moderates, most of whom hail from purple districts and are at serious risk of losing their seats in the midterms, did not find any sympathetic ears among Johnson or his top leadership allies in the final weeks.

“They made their case,” one senior House Republican involved in the talks said of the centrists. Their last-minute push for a floor vote wouldn’t change party leaders’ belief that they didn’t have the votes to actually pass an extension of the subsidies, the senior Republican added — especially given divides within their conference over abortion coverage.

Johnson said in a recent interview he understood the “dilemma” facing some of the moderates who have since launched discharge petitions to try to force a vote on an extension. But privately Johnson’s leadership circle was always skeptical that those petitions would ever garner enough support to force the speaker’s hand.

One big problem for the centrists: They were too late.

By the time Fitzpatrick and Kiggans launched separate discharge petitions aimed at extending the subsidies, there were not enough legislative days left to trigger a vote before the House adjourns for the year and the tax credits lapse. Notably, the Republican moderates mostly kept quiet during the entire 43-day government shutdown — and didn’t publicly pressure Johnson and fellow GOP leaders to negotiate as Democrats made the expiring tax credits the centerpiece of the fight.

Fitzpatrick, a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, vowed last week to keep pushing to extend the subsidies.

“They can just dig themselves into an ideological corner all day long — it’s not fixing the problem,” Fitzpatrick said about party leaders in an interview. “We can agree that the current construct is flawed, but that letting them expire is not acceptable.”

Late last week, he and other moderates pushed Johnson to allow a vote on a floor amendment to the GOP health care bill or another outlet that would allow skeptical members an opportunity to express support for extending the subsidies.

But hammering out that amendment has proven intractable, with Johnson indicating directly to the group that he was trying to make something work while others in the leadership ranks remained skeptical they could.

Fitzpatrick indicated Monday he plans to propose an amendment in the Rules Committee that would be modeled off his bipartisan bill that proposed a two-year subsidy extension with an income cap and other eligibility restrictions. But as of Monday there was no agreement to allow it to come to a vote, Majority Leader Steve Scalise said.

“I don’t think the final decision’s been made” on the amendment, he told reporters.

The group of moderates planned to huddle on the House floor Monday night to finalize their strategy for the Tuesday Rules meeting, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the private plans.

Separately, Fitzpatrick will meet Wednesday with the Problem Solvers to discuss their next steps on health care, two other people said, and he's invited a bipartisan group of rank-and-file senators who have also been exploring a bipartisan deal.

Valadao, a senior appropriator who heads the centrist-leaning Republican Governance Group caucus, was among dozens of Republicans who lost their seats in 2018 after Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare. He declined to say in an interview Monday how he would vote on the leadership-backed health bill.

“We’ll see how the amendment plays out,” he said.

Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who heads the House GOP campaign arm, said in an interview Monday he hasn’t given vulnerable members any advice about how they should be talking about the expiring Obamacare subsidies in their districts.

“What I’ve been saying to my colleagues is that we’ve all got to do a better job of talking about what we’re for,” Hudson said. “Because we have actual policies that would bring down premiums and make health care more affordable — we just need to be more vocal about it.”

Asked if he was worried about the expiring subsidies costing House Republicans the majority next year, he said, “No.”

“Premiums are high — we told them they would be high if Obamacare passed,” Hudson said.