House Republicans face a basic math problem: with just 219 votes, their majority isn’t very big.
That means that if they try to pass legislation along party lines, they can afford basically no defections, at most a single holdout.
If House Republicans cannot pass legislation by themselves, they will need to rely on Democratic votes or the legislation will not pass.
Conservatives in the House, like the Freedom Caucus, are a minority of this small majority. They do not have the votes to curtail federal spending by themselves. They can only do so by withholding their votes from leadership-backed legislation that doesn’t go far enough on cutting spending.
Sometimes that works. But there are also centrist GOP lawmakers from swing districts, including some carried by President Joe Biden in 2020, that won’t necessarily go along with
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