The measure extending tax cuts and slashing the social safety net goes to President Trump for his signature, but the debate over it exposed deep rifts in his party.
by Michael Gold, Robert Jimison, and Megan Mineiro - Reporting from the Capitol
The House on Thursday narrowly passed a sweeping bill to extend tax cuts and slash social safety net programs, capping Republicans’ chaotic monthslong slog to overcome deep rifts within their party and deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda.
The final vote, 218 to 214, was mostly along party lines and came after Speaker Mike Johnson spent a frenzied day and night toiling to quell resistance in his ranks that threatened until the very end to derail the president’s marquee legislation. With all but two Republicans in favor and Democrats uniformly opposed, the action cleared the bill for Mr. Trump’s signature, meeting the July 4 deadline he had demanded.
The legislation extends tax cuts enacted in 2017 that had been scheduled to expire at the end of the year, while adding new ones Mr. Trump promised during this campaign, on some tips and overtime pay, at a total cost of $4.5 trillion. It also increases funding for defense and border security and cuts nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, with more reductions to food assistance for the poor and other government aid. And it phases out clean-energy tax credits passed under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that Mr. Trump and conservative Republicans have long decried.
Also included is a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit, a measure that Republicans are typically unwilling to support but that was necessary to avert a federal default later this year.
The bill’s final passage was a major victory for congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump, who is expected to swiftly sign what he has frequently referred to as his “big, beautiful bill.” G.O.P. lawmakers who had feuded bitterly over the legislation united almost unanimously behind it, fearing the political consequences of allowing a tax increase and of crossing a president who demands unflagging loyalty and was pressuring them to fall into line.
“If you’re for a secure border, safer communities and a strong military, this bill is for you,” Mr. Johnson said, extolling the bill ahead of the final vote. “If you’re for common-sense fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit, this bill is for you. If you’re for fairer and lower taxes, bigger paychecks, affordable gas and groceries and restoring dignity to hard work, this is the bill for you.”
But it also was a major political gamble for the party that will leave vulnerable lawmakers open to sharp attacks ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Many economists have estimated that its greatest benefits would go to the wealthiest Americans, who would see the most generous tax cuts. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that cuts to Medicaid, including the imposition of a strict work requirement, could leave 11.8 million more people without health insurance by 2034.
The office, studying earlier versions of the bill, had also warned of large benefit losses in food stamps, which will also have new work requirements, threatening to leave millions without benefits. At the same time, contrary to Republican claims that it cut deficits, the budget office reported the measure would swell the already soaring national debt by at least $3.4 trillion over a decade.
Polls show that the bill is deeply unpopular, and Democrats have roundly denounced it as a move to slash critical government programs to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. They have repeatedly accused Republicans of being so much in Mr. Trump’s thrall that they embraced a bill that would harm their own constituents.
In an impassioned closing speech on the House floor that stretched for more than eight and a half hours, breaking the chamber’s record and delaying a final vote well into the afternoon, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, assailed the measure as a “disgusting abomination” that would hurt Americans.
In what amounted to a last gasp of Democratic opposition to the bill, Mr. Jeffries spent much of his time reading testimonials from Americans who said they relied on Medicaid, SNAP nutrition assistance and other government help and worried that cuts would upend their lives. He made a point of highlighting that several of the letters came from people who live in Republican congressional districts that are among the Democrats’ top targets for the midterm elections.
“This bill is an all-out assault on the health care of the people of the United States of America, hardworking American taxpayers,” Mr. Jeffries said. “These are the people we should be standing up, to work hard to lift up. But instead, they’re victims of this legislation.”
In the messy, monthslong process of pushing through a bill that divided their party, Republicans in both the House and Senate made it clear that they, too, were uncomfortable with parts of it, criticizing its flaws before most of them ultimately banded together to pass it.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who cast the deciding vote for the bill in her chamber after cutting a series of deals to insulate her constituents from its harshest cuts, said just moments after she had backed the bill that she did not like it.
“This has been an awful process — a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution,” Ms. Murkowski said in a statement earlier this week, in which she urged the House to reopen and improve it.
As if to underscore the political risks of the bill — and the intense pressure Republicans faced from Mr. Trump to embrace it — Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced during Senate debate on it that he would not seek re-election next year. He went on to savage the bill as a disaster for Medicaid that would betray the president’s promises to protect the program. The announcement from Mr. Tillis, whom Mr. Trump had threatened with a primary challenge after he expressed opposition to the bill, was a harsh reminder for Republicans of the consequences of crossing the president on the measure.
Because of the slim Republican majorities in both chambers, ideological rifts within the party were frequently magnified as Mr. Johnson and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, tried to muscle the legislation through the House and Senate. They succeeded only after protracted negotiations, several seemingly insurmountable setbacks and parliamentary gymnastics.
The House devolved into paralysis on Wednesday and into Thursday morning in the hours before the final action, as a handful of Republicans withheld their votes to bring up the measure.
Mr. Trump, who had met with recalcitrant Republicans throughout the day Wednesday to pressure them to support the measure, weighed in with angry posts on social media, threatening any defectors.
“MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” he wrote.
In the end, Mr. Johnson pulled off a victory, the latest in a series of instances in which he has faced resistance in his own party to a major legislative priority — only to pull out a narrow win with the help of considerable pressure from Mr. Trump.
The bill squeaked through the Senate by the narrowest of margins on Tuesday. But the changes that senators made to cobble together support for it exacerbated party divides that have plagued G.O.P. efforts to advance Mr. Trump’s agenda since the beginning. Fiscal conservatives demanded even deeper cuts to rein in the deficit, while more mainstream lawmakers whose seats are at risk were wary of the biggest cuts to popular government programs.
One member of each faction voted against the bill on Thursday: Representative Thomas Massie, a fiscal hawk from a deep-red district in Kentucky who had railed against the high cost of the bill, and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate from a battleground district in suburban Pennsylvania that Democrats won in the 2024 presidential election, who had expressed concern about the Medicaid, SNAP and other safety net cuts.
Mr. Trump and party leaders refused to reopen the bill for changes, a time-consuming process that would have blown through the president’s chosen timetable and prolonged negotiations on the package for weeks or months, potentially killing the entire enterprise.
Ultimately, the fiscal conservatives who had railed the most strongly against the bill followed a familiar pattern of caving and supporting it. Conservatives have repeatedly refused to back major legislation because of its potential impact on federal deficits, only to back down under pressure from Mr. Trump.
Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, one such holdout, alluded to deals that he and others cut with Mr. Trump. Mr. Harris, the chairman of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, said that lawmakers were swayed by talk of “executive actions” and other steps he and his administration could take to change the way the law would be carried out.
“We came to significant agreements with the administration that changed the entire package, both inside and outside the bill, significantly.” Mr. Harris said after the final vote. (Once enacted, the legislation itself cannot be changed except by an act of Congress.)
Moments after the bill passed, some Freedom Caucus members were already raising the possibility of trying to push through another big policy bill later in the year under special rules that shield fiscal measures from a filibuster, allowing them to pass by a simple majority vote.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a Freedom Caucus member and one of the Republican holdouts who ultimately voted to pass the bill, said Mr. Trump and White House officials assured him on Wednesday they could use “another reconciliation package or two,” and executive orders, “to fix some of the broken appropriations process,” including additional changes to Medicaid, as well as to Medicare.
“I got comfortable with what the administration can do to ameliorate those areas where it got worse,” after the bill was passed by the Senate, Mr. Roy added.
Emboldened by the G.O.P. rifts, Democrats have made a point of projecting a united front while they railed against the bill and ramped up pressure on vulnerable Republicans. They condemned Republicans who had warned that many of their constituents rely on Medicaid and cautioned their party’s leaders not to try to balance the federal budget at the expense of the much-needed health care program.
“We cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations,” wrote Representative David Valadao of California, one of the most endangered Republicans, and 12 other G.O.P. lawmakers in an April letter to Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Jeffries highlighted such statements during his remarks, appealing to Republicans to reject the bill.
“Join us, join us, join us!” he shouted at one point, turning to the G.O.P. side of the chamber. “All we need are four,” he added, alluding to the number of Republican defections that would defeat the measure. But as the Democratic leader well knew, the Republicans who had spoken out had flipped their positions on the bill overnight.
When the final vote came, every signatory to the letter voted yes.
(nytimes.com)
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