WASHINGTON >> The fate of a budget blueprint to unlock President Donald Trump’s spending and tax cuts was in doubt in the House on Tuesday as conservative Republicans lined up in opposition to the measure, arguing it would add too much to the nation’s debt.

House Republican leaders pressed for a vote as early as Wednesday to move their party’s budget resolution past its next hurdle, after the Senate approved the measure in an overnight weekend session.

The action would clear the way for the GOP to craft legislation carrying out Trump’s domestic agenda and move it through Congress over unified Democratic opposition. A defeat or failure to move it would imperil his priorities, sending Republicans back to the drawing board to come up with an entirely new plan.

White House meeting

But even after Trump met for roughly two hours Tuesday afternoon with a group of conservative hard-liners who have refused to back the resolution, it was not clear whether he had persuaded enough of them to guarantee passage, given the party’s slim House majority. At the meeting, the president “expressed his commitment to making sure we get the job done, that we find real savings to change the debt trajectory for the country, but also protect the essential programs,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.

Johnson has leaned heavily on Trump in recent months to persuade GOP skeptics to fall in line on key votes. Even the staunchest holdouts have shown the president extraordinary deference, giving in at critical moments. After meeting with Trump on Tuesday, at least a handful of Republicans who had expressed concerns about the budget measure said that they would support the resolution.

“We have House issues, aHnd we have Senate issues to deal with,” said Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas. “But at the end of the day, I think we’re all working for the same goals.”

‘The votes just aren’t there’

But some were unmoved. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told CNN that he was still opposed to the resolution. And some of the most determined holdouts did not even attend the meeting with Trump, either because they were not invited or because they refused to go.

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the chair of the Freedom Caucus, said that he had been invited to the meeting with Trump but had declined to attend.

“No matter what the president tells anybody, the votes just aren’t there,” Harris said, adding that there were “at least a dozen” Republicans who would refuse to vote for the resolution.

“He’s just not going to change my mind,” Harris said of Trump.

Rep. Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chair of the Budget Committee, who has called the resolution “unserious and disappointing,” also did not attend. He said that he was “going to be doing other things.”

If all Democrats vote against it, Johnson can afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the resolution. Many more than that have said that they are opposed.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a letter to Johnson challenged him to a one-on-one debate over their budget differences.

“Mano a Mano,” Jeffries posted on social media. “The American people deserve to know the truth.”

Trump insisted he had a “very good” meeting with Johnson and the conservatives and said he wanted big cuts, too. The conservative holdouts are unhappy with the level of spending reductions in the Senate resolution: roughly $4 billion over a decade, or a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that the House had approved.

Republican leaders have said that number is a minimum intended to give them more flexibility to comply with strict procedural rules in the Senate. They must follow those rules in order to take advantage of a process called reconciliation that allows them to push the tax and budget measure through the Senate, shielding it from a filibuster.

But first, the Senate and the House must agree on the same budget blueprint.

Senate gimmick seen

Many House Republicans are also unhappy with the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because such a move simply maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so that they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit. But fiscal hawks in the House have rejected that strategy, describing it as a gimmick.

“No serious individual would suggest that this is going to possibly reduce the deficits,” said Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri. “This is going to only accelerate our deficit.”

Their resistance poses a familiar problem for Johnson.

Johnson on Tuesday argued that House Republicans needed to approve the legislation so that lawmakers could get to work writing the bill with the tax and spending cuts favored by Trump.

““We’ve got to get this done.”

He added: “We have no luxury of complacency, and we really don’t have time to dither on this thing.”

This report contains information from the Associated Press.