The representative Gabe Evans, Republican of Colorado, assured his ticket to Washington in November when he defeated a Democratic member of Congress for less than 1 percentage point, only 2,449 votes.
Now Mr. Evans, 39, is helping to write legislation that can consolidate his own ticket at home.
The first -period congressman, whose swing district to northern Denver includes 151,749 Medicaid receptors, is in the Energy and Commerce Committee. The republican budget resolution that establishes the basis for the radical legislation to promulgate the domestic agenda of President Trump instructs the panel, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, to reduce spending by $ 880 billion around the next decade to help pay a great tax. That number is impossible to reach without reducing the cost of Medicaid, the government program that provides health insurance for low -income Americans.
As the Republicans in Congress struggle to join around the central pieces of what Trump calls his “a beautiful and beautiful bill,” Mr. Evans and other republican legislators of some of the most competitive districts in the country face votes of the committee next week to approve cuts to popular programs that could go to persecute them politicians.
And the Democrats are cheerful to the perspective that the Republican holders who go to the registration that support the effort.
“These members of the Congress won with fewer votes than the number of people in their district in Medicaid,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist and former spokesman for the campaign committee of the Democratic Congress. “Voting for this is how to be the titanic captain and deciding to intentionally hit the iceberg.”
The group includes the representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Iowa Republican, which is also in the Energy and Commerce Committee and is equally trembling land as Mr. Evans, despite having moved away a challenger several times. Last year, Mrs. Miller-Meeks, which represents 132,148 beneficiaries of Medicaid, won her seat by 0.2 percent, or 799 votes. His local office in Davenport has been besieged for protesters concerned about expense cuts.
Also in the panel is the representative Thomas H. Kean Jr., a Republican of a highly competitive district in New Jersey.
In the Agriculture Committee, which must find $ 230 billion in cuts approximately one decade, Republicans are fighting for how much to reduce federal food assistance programs, with those of competitive seats distrusted reductions that could its constitution could. This panel also includes some of the most endangered Republicans: representatives Rob Bresnahan Jr., a first -term republican of Pennsylvania; Don Bacon or Nebraska; Zach Nunn or Iowa; and Derrick Van Order of Wisconsin.
Both committees are expected to meet next week to work and finish their bills, although that could change if Republicans do not reach an agreement on what cuts should be included. The panels had a leg scheduled to meet this week, but pushed the meetings in persistent disagreements.
“Many of them have been talking in deprived of their leadership, they tell them, this is a really difficult vote for them,” said Minesota’s representative of Minesota, the Democratic classification in the Agriculture Committee, of the Republicans.
In addition to his dilemma, Trump has said he does not want to “touch” Medicaid, and some of the extreme right, although the leaders are increasingly alarms about cutting the program.
“Medicaid: You can be careful, because a lot of magician is in Medicaid,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former advisor, about his “War Room” podcast. More than 60 percent of Trump voters said Medicaid was “very important” for their communities, according to a recent KFF survey.
As the Republican party struggles to improvise the legislation that can please its right flank, which requires deep cuts, without alienating ways that oppose them, many vulnerable legislators fear that they are establishing issues to be scared.
Representative Nick Lalota, a New York Republican who opposes Medicaid’s cuts, said he and his colleagues had no interest in going through the difficult process of writing and voting for a bill that finally could not approve the Senate, which has adopted a fraction of the cuts of expenses that the camera has.
“We don’t seek to float a test balloon,” Lalota said in an interview. “We just because voting for something real, that the Senate is passable and that the president will sign.”
Such concerns are one of the reasons why President Mike Johnson was forced to eliminate this week one of the most aggressive options that the Republican Party was considering reducing Medicaid’s costs: Reducing what the federal government pays to the states by the point of view of what became Elefh that became the medical expansion of the elected care law.
In private, many Republicans in Capitol Hill said they expected the Chamber to impose the deadline of the Fallen Day to write and approve the bill, and any life in a tax cuts package approved by the Senate that includes Medic. Such a result would be enraged the tax conservatives in hard law, that they demand that the package not sound to the deficit and that the entire package could lower if they refuse to follow.
Some vulnerable Republicans who oppose cutting Medicaid said they still hoped to find other ways to reduce program costs, such as imposing work and hardening requirements of the rules to ensure that undocumented immigrants, who are prohibited by the program’s law, cannot receive any of their services. And they point out that they are other proposals to increase the federal income necessary to compensate for tax cuts.
“There are ways to reduce the energy and trade budget that are not just medical attention,” Lalota said. “I am not so fatalistic that it is a difficult vote.”
But the cleaning of the medicalid fraud and adjustment rules generate much less money than what the Republican plan requires. And the Congress Budget Office wrote on Wednesday that after estimating the budget impact of four different options to cut Medicaid, they would all have the same general result: “Registration would decrease and the number of people without healing Sane Heal Heal Heal Heal Heal Heal Heal Heal.”
Democrats have the legs of the week to capitalize on the potential impact of cuts.
They have pointed to vulnerable Republicans with advertising fences in their districts, the vote battery issue to reduce Medicaid to give billionaires such as Elon Musk a tax reduction. The National Republican Campaign Committee issued a cessation and withdrawal letter on advertising fences, calling them defamatory.
“All national Democrats have pathetic and tactical lies of fear wear to distract from their failures,” said a committee spokesman Mike Marinella, in a statement.
Mr. Evans, on the other hand, has been trying to thread the needle criticizing the way in which his state manages Medicaid, charging that he has paid millions of dollars to dead people and undocumented immigrants.
“The general objective is to be able to protect the program by eliminating fraud, waste and abuse,” he told a Colorado public radio station last month. He declined to comment for this article.
Mrs. Craig said her hope was that some Republicans who are central would face their leaders and simply draw a red line in any cut for the supplementary nutritional assistance program or medicid.
“The real question is whether the moderate ones in my committee are really going to take this to the mat and fight these cuts or if they are going to give in,” said Craig.
For the newcomers to Congress as Mr. Evans and Mr. Bresnahan, the situation has echoes of the difficult position that the representative Marjorie Mezvinsky, a Democratic congressman of a single term of Pennsylvania, who faced in 1993 when he voted for the budget of President Bill Clinton after he originally opposed him because he did not include the cuts of sufficient expenses.
When she cast the decisive vote, the Republicans knew they were witnessing a political death.
On the floor of the house, they sang: “Goodbye, Marjorie!”
It was defeated the following year.
