TURNING ON TRUMP

GOP Rebels Deliver Sharp Rebuke of Johnson on Health Care

A group of Republican lawmakers voted with Democrats to extend ACA subsidies after months of pushback.

A group of House Republicans bucked Speaker Mike Johnson and voted for the extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies.

The 17 fed-up Republicans voted with every Democrat for the final total of 230 to 196 to extend the subsidies for three years.

Supporters of the credits could be heard cheering in the chamber after the bill passed.

It was a brutal rebuke of GOP congressional leadership and President Donald Trump, who have pushed back on extending the pandemic-era credits for months.

The rift in the GOP has been growing since before the tax credits expired at the end of last year, leading to skyrocketing health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

The vote in the House only came after four frustrated Republicans from battleground districts signed onto Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ discharge petition last month to force a vote after Johnson refused to bring the bill to the floor.

It was the latest in a series of rebellions against the speaker, who entered the 2026 midterm year with just a razor-thin Republican majority.

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By Thursday afternoon, 11 GOP lawmakers joined every House Democrat to begin debate on the bill before the final vote.

The passage of an extension in the House came after the government shut down for a record 43 days last fall as Democrats pushed for the extension of the Obamacare subsidies in the short-term government funding bill, but Republicans refused to include it.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blasted Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, as a failure, but throughout his 10 years in politics, he has never produced an alternative to replace his predecessor’s signature law.

This week, Trump again urged House Republicans to come up with their own health care plan to take the issue away from Democrats as a line of attack ahead of the midterms, but he did not provide details on how to proceed.

The president instead claimed the money should go directly to people rather than insurance companies and irked some conservatives by suggesting Republicans should be flexible on abortion.

Even with the bipartisan passage of the 3-year ACA subsidies extension in the House, it’s not assured to move forward in the Senate.

A group of bipartisan senators have been working on possible compromise legislation to address the rising cost of health care, but the final plan has yet to be revealed. They met with a bipartisan group of House members to discuss it on Thursday.

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Democrats have admitted that there is more work to be done to fix the health care system, but they argued extending the tax credits was the first step to immediately address the staggering costs for millions for Americans.

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The vote in the House on Thursday was the latest in a series of rebellions against GOP congressional leadership after a group of Republican lawmakers last fall also signed onto a discharge petition to force the vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files despite Johnson’s opposition.

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Sarah Ewall-WicePolitical Reporter

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