House GOP leaders plow ahead with plan that will allow Obamacare subsidies to lapse

By Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — Speaker Mike Johnson is charging ahead with a GOP health plan that allows Biden-era Obamacare subsidies to expire this month — all but guaranteeing that the money will indeed lapse and spike premiums for tens of millions of Americans next year.

In a high-stakes Tuesday night meeting, top House Republicans rejected a last-ditch push from a small bloc of GOP centrists to consider bipartisan measures to avert that funding cliff. Those Republicans – led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Lawler of New York – have repeatedly warned GOP leaders that ignoring the deadline will cause a health care affordability crisis across the country.

One of those stern warnings came just hours earlier, as Fitzpatrick, Lawler and other Republicans directly confronted Johnson over his stance on the issue during a contentious closed-door meeting.

The GOP centrists had pushed bipartisan proposals that would extend the enhanced subsidies temporarily with what Fitzpatrick described as “guardrails,” such as income caps to ensure the money goes to middle and working class Americans. Dozens of centrist Democrats were already on board, with more Democrats privately willing to support the proposal if it came to the floor.

But the powerful House Rules Committee — which is effectively controlled by Johnson — formally decided Tuesday night they would not allow the centrists’ measures to come up for a vote. With just three scheduled work days left in 2025, the GOP leaders’ decision to choke off amendments on their health care bill means there is essentially no path to bringing the Obamacare matter to a vote at all this year.

The clash between GOP leaders and moderates is spiking tensions inside the already-dysfunctional House GOP conference, with many centrists fuming at their own leadership for ignoring what they fear could be a health care crisis — as well as a political one for their party next November.

The centrists argue that they spent days altering their own proposal to meet party leaders’ demands, including finding a way to pay for the measure, after a lengthy back-and-forth over the weekend. But in the end, it was rejected anyway.

Now that GOP leaders have boxed out centrists from a floor vote, centrists’ only path to bring up the measure is through a procedural gambit known as a discharge petition — which is designed to be a tool for the minority party, rather than overruling members’ own leadership.

Lawler acknowledged that bleak reality in his remarks to the committee as he pleaded for a floor vote on the proposal.

“In the absence of our leadership putting a vote on the floor … the only feasible path forward is a discharge petition,” Lawler said, addressing fellow Republicans as they debated the centrists’ amendments.

Centrists’ next steps are not yet clear. When asked by reporters Tuesday, three Republicans — Fitzpatrick, Lawler and Rep. Kevin Kiley — did not rule out supporting a Democratic effort to force a vote to extend the subsidies for three years without reforms. Democrats only need four Republicans to back the measure and it will be guaranteed a floor vote.

It would be a remarkable move by GOP centrists to back a measure from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, particularly one that each of those three Republicans have said is flawed because it does not reform the current system at all.

“I think the only thing worse than a clean extension without any income limits and any reforms – because it’s not a perfect system. The only thing worse than that would be expiration,” Fitzpatrick said Tuesday night when asked about the Democratic push. “And I would make that decision.”

Weeks of rising tensions between the GOP centrists and Johnson came to a head earlier in the day, when a group of those lawmakers directly confronted the speaker in a closed-door meeting.

At multiple points during the meeting, the discussion was so heated that parts of it could be heard by reporters outside the room. Several GOP lawmakers raised their voices to vent their frustrations at the speaker, according to multiple attendees.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York described the meeting as “tense.”

“I think it’s the frustration from members who feel that we have a good compromise solution here to address a real problem. And that leadership is shutting it down,” Malliotakis said.

Kiley of California added: “We want to see a vote, and not just a show vote but a vote that actually has an opportunity to become law. And you know, that was conveyed very clearly at this meeting, at other meetings, for weeks now.”

Several of those GOP centrists, including Malliotakis and Kiley, left the meeting with the impression that a deal was still possible. Centrists were quietly assembling a new amendment to present at the House Rules Committee in the coming hours that Johnson seemed to support in the meeting, those members said.

“I am very hopeful that this committee does rule them in order,” Fitzpatrick told the Rules panel during his testimony.

But within an hour, that hope was dashed.

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CNN’s Ellis Kim contributed to this report.