How Scold-and-Fold Became the GOP’s Calling Card

At 6:50 PM on Wednesday, conservative hardliner Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) tweeted that the Senate’s version of the Republican megabill was “morally and fiscally bankrupt.” At 3:20 AM Thursday morning, Self nevertheless voted to advance that very bill.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) likewise slammed the Senate amendments as a “travesty” that undermined “the good things” in the House bill. He, too, joined Self in finally supporting the legislation in the wee hours Thursday morning. Both held out longer than their moderate colleague Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), who said in a post on X last week that he could not vote for any Senate changes to the Medicaid provisions in the House version of the bill.

These reversals may be surprising, but they were not remarkable. It was par for the course for congressional Republicans who, in recent years, have shown a proclivity for taking bold, theatrical stands before meekly capitulating in the face of political pressure — particularly from President Donald Trump.

In just the past six months, hardline conservatives have expressed concerns about backing a continuing resolution, two different budget resolutions and the initial House version of the Republican megabill before caving in to pressure from Trump. In May, conservatives originally threatened to withhold their vote for the “One Big Beautiful Bill” because it provided a tax deduction targeted at residents of blue states. The head of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), even insisted it might take weeks to appease hard-right concerns on May 21.

It passed early in the morning the next day after hard right conservatives yielded overnight.

It was no different this week when they loudly and repeatedly expressed horror and dismay at the version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the Senate. There was outrage that it increased the deficit. Complaints that it didn’t do enough to roll back efforts to encourage clean energy were abundant.

Conservatives wanted changes to the bill to address these concerns. The problem is that it would have required the bill to be sent back to the Senate, either through legislative ‘ping pong’ or through the traditional expedient of a conference committee. That would have been time consuming — and prevented Republicans from passing the legislation by Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline. Republicans had until the end of the year to do the most urgent part of the legislation, the extension of the 2017 tax cuts, but the decision was made to treat Trump’s deadline as a firm time limit in the same way Congress might handle the looming debt crisis or the expiration of government funding.

On Wednesday morning, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who railed against the imposition of “arbitrary deadlines,” told POLITICO those kinds of deadlines led to “panicking” and it wasn’t going to work.

Needless to say, Burchett eventually voted for the bill, too.

The truth is that there really wasn’t any other option but to stick to an arbitrary deadline, because it’s what Trump wanted. Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican, bluntly explained that extending the deadline to make last-minute alterations wasn’t going to happen because Trump didn’t want it. “It became clear from the president’s meeting at the White House to further conversations later, that there’s going to be no more amendments to the bill,” he said.

Republican Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) analogized the situation to a restive football team that occasionally forgets who is calling the plays and needs a reminder. “You may be a good receiver, you may be an all star running back, but the quarterback is still Donald J. Trump.”

When it was all over, the holdouts justified the Big Fold in predictable fashion, claiming to have won valuable concessions even if none of those would be enacted into law.

Burchett, one of the holdouts who eventually capitulated, said that he had “a very good conversation with President Trump and Vice President Vance.” That discussion gave him confidence that the administration would “go after fraud and get rid of a lot of the nonsense in our energy policies.”

Harris, another holdout, told reporters, “we came to significant agreements with the administration overnight on executive actions that will make America great again.”

Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), who long expressed concern about the deficit implications of the legislation — which by a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimate will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade — the process represented a combination of policy negotiation and airing of grievances. “It was a little bit of hearing people out,” said the ardent fiscal hawk. But there were also policy issues as “everyone became convinced it just didn't make sense to send it back to the Senate.”

A more jaundiced and skeptical view was taken by Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.), who described the dramatic scold-and-fold as a venting exercise by the usual suspects who always “cry wolf.”

“There's just a couple people that really want to talk a lot about things that are important to them, and they use these pressure points as opportunities to force people to listen to them,” said the four-term incumbent. “I don't think you accomplish much, but we got it done.”

In the final hours before the House narrowly passed the sweeping legislation, despite all the apocalyptic rhetoric about the bill’s drawback, all was forgotten and forgiven. The group of conservative holdouts, including Self and Roy, gathered in the center aisle of the House at about 3:15 in the morning. The dozen hardliners, who did not want to support the Senate bill as written, joined together for a smiling group picture just before they all cast their votes to help make that text the law of land.

The photographer, using a cell phone camera, was Speaker Mike Johnson himself.

“He just pulled out his camera and we took the picture,” said Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.), one of the hardliners who yielded. “It was awesome.”

The Republican holdouts had ended their fight by getting together to strike a pose. It wasn’t difficult. After all, they had been posing all week.