Maryland House members, on both sides of the aisle, pan Senate budget bill

Maryland’s House members slammed the Senate-passed budget bill Tuesday and predicted tough sledding for the measure when it comes back to the House — Democrats because it cuts too much and the state’s sole Republican because it doesn’t cut enough.

“I’m heartbroken – not just because of what this bill does, but because of who it leaves behind,” Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-6th) said in a statement.

“The numbers are staggering!” McClain-Delaney wrote. “To support this bill would be to betray the 1.5 million Maryland residents who rely on Medicaid, which includes 50% of Maryland’s children.”

Medicaid cuts were a prime concern for Democrats among the items in the 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill, which also makes deep cuts to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and to schools, among other social program cuts.

At the same time, the bill increases defense and Homeland Security spending and makes permanent tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term that were set to expire at the end of this year. Democrats say those tax cuts benefit the wealthy more than working-class taxpayers.

The Congressional Budget Office released a report Sunday that said the combination of tax cuts and higher spending in the Senate version of the bill could add $3.25 trillion to the federal deficit — a number that is bringing pushback from fiscal hawks in the House.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. But in an interview with Fox News, he said the Senate bill “is not ready for prime time.”

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“This is not going to sail through the House,” Harris said. “We’re going to have to negotiate one more time, and that’s just appropriate. That’s the way the legislative process works, and the way it should work on a bill of this size.

Time for lawmakers to negotiate is running out, as President Donald Trump has been pushing to have the bill he calls the One Big, Beautiful Bill on his desk by July Fourth.

But there’s little wiggle room in either the House or Senate on the bill, which Democrats loathe and Republicans are divided between those in swing districts who worry deep program cuts will alienate some voters and budget hardliners who see a continually growing deficit.

The bill passed the Senate 51-50 Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote after three Republicans joined 47 Democrats and independents in opposition. That vote followed a round-the-clock marathon of dealing and voting over the weekend.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) faces a similary slim majority, and can only afford to lose three GOP member if he hopes to get the bill to the president intact by Friday.

Harris said that may not happen.

The first test comes Wednesday, when the House is scheduled to take a procedural vote on the Senate version of the bill. Harris has said he will vote against advancing the bill on the procedural vote, and he expects to be joined by other House Freedom Caucus members.

“I don’t think the votes are there, just like they weren’t in the Senate initially, until some concessions were made,” Harris told Fox Tuesday. “I believe that the rule vote will not pass tomorrow morning, and then the speaker is going to have to decide how he gets this back into the … House framework.”

Harris told the network he thinks it will take “couple of days” to reach a compromise with the Senate. He sidestepped questions about his support for the Senate bill saying only that he was against the procedural vote.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th) said Harris should worry about the cuts in the underlying bill — and not because they don’t cut deep enough. Harris’ rural Eastern Shore district is one of the most Medicaid-dependent in the state, Raskin notes.

Four counties in Harris’ 1st District — Caroline, Dorchester, Somerset and Wicomico — all have enrollment rates above the state’s average of 19.8%, according to a study by the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Somerset, where 25.7% are enrolled in Medicaid, is second only to Baltimore City’s 29.7%, according to the report.

Raskin also said the cost of the bill should be a gut-check for fiscal conservatives.

“This is really a moment of truth for Andy Harris and others in the Freedom Caucus. Are they just interested in going along with all of Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves. Or do they really care about reducing the debt and the deficit?” he said. “If they vote for this, they can never mention the word debt or deficit again, because this is the single most calamitous contribution to the federal debt in in our lifetime.”

For Raskin, Medicatd funding is the primary concern. The Senate bill cuts $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over a decade. Nationally, that means nearly 12 million people would lose their coverage, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Maryland receives about $8.5 billion annually in Medicaid. Raskin said the Senate cuts would cost the state about $1 billion in Medicaid funding, pusing roughly 245,000 people off the rolls — a number Raskin said included Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and some residents who have insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

“Essentially, our people face having their health coverage stripped away from them at a time when the state is already reeling from federal policies,” said Raskin, who called the bill “a chainsaw massacre approach to health care.”

He said that approach is unwarranted, given the fact that it will add to the national debt rather than reduce it.

“I just don’t see the logic of doing this,” he said, “We’re undermining the health care of our own people and the well being of our own people, while we’re piling more than $3 trillion of new debt onto our children and grandchildren, and it’s all to pay for just a drunken tax break for people who don’t need it.”

McClain-Delaney said one family in nine in her Western Maryland district relies on SNAP, or food stamps, and nearly one in seven residents, including a third of children in the district, rely on Medicaid, she wrote.

“Balancing the budget shouldn’t come at their expense,” McClain Delaney wrote. “It’s not just bad policy, it’s a failure of compassion.”

As the Senate was voting to pass the bill Tuesday, Rep. Johnny Olszewski Jr. (D-2nd) was already sounding the alarm of how cuts to food assistance could affect some 20,000 families in his district.

“This bill … it is big, but it is not beautiful. It is cruel and it would take food out of the mouths of hungry kids,” he said Tuesday at an event at Cockeysville Library to celebrate the launch of a new summer meals site where lower-income families and their kids can pick up a free lunch.

“Expansions like the one we’re celebrating today … could disappear overnight,” he warned. Summer meal assistance programs implemented by the state often use federal funding to support operations.

Olszewski later told reporters that with Maryland’s tight fiscal outlook, the state would struggle to fill any missing dollars cut that are currently funding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“I think Maryland would be very hard pressed to find ways to fill the gap for these cuts,” he said. “We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts in just food support alone – not mentioning the massive cuts to Medicaid and health coverage … Programs like today that we announced here at this library are unlikely to continue without funding.”

Raskin holds out hope that the bill will “go back to ground zero” once it returns to the House. He said moderate Republicans from districts in California, New Jersey and New York and conservative Republicans including those in the Freedom Caucus have reasons — albeit different ones — to vote against the bill.

“I think that already this bill is way underwater in polling, and I hope that these politicians will recognize that it will be a career-terminating event for them to get involved with it,” he said.