U.S. House Republicans propelled President Donald Trump’s big multitrillion-dollar tax breaks and spending cuts bill to final congressional passage on Thursday, overcoming multiple setbacks to approve his signature second-term policy package before a Fourth of July deadline.
The tight roll call, 218-214, came at a potentially high political cost, with two Republicans joining all Democrats opposed. GOP leaders worked overnight and the president himself leaned on a handful of skeptics to drop their opposition.
Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries delayed voting for more than eight hours by seizing control of the floor with a record-breaking speech against the bill.
Trump celebrated his victory in Iowa, where he attended the kickoff for a year of events marking the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary.
“I want to thank Republican congressmen and women, because what they did is incredible,” he said. Trump complained that Democrats voted against the bill because “they hate Trump — but I hate them too.”
Trump said he plans to sign the legislation on Friday at the White House.
The bill includes a massive spending increase for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a decrease in funding for Medicaid.
The outcome delivers a milestone for the president and his party. It was a long-shot effort to compile a lengthy list of GOP priorities into the bill, which stands at nearly 900 pages.
With Democrats unified in opposition, the bill will become a defining measure of Trump’s return to the White House, aided by Republican control of Congress.
“You get tired of winning yet?” said U.S. House Speaker and Republican Mike Johnson, invoking Trump as he called the vote.
“With one big, beautiful bill we are going to make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before,” he said.
Republicans celebrated with a rendition of the Village People’s Y.M.C.A., a song the U.S. president often plays at his rallies, during a ceremony afterward.
At its core, the package’s priority is $4.5 trillion US in tax breaks enacted in 2017, during Trump’s first term, that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. This includes allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year.
There’s also a hefty investment, some $350 billion, in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.
To help offset the lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a major rollback of green energy tax credits.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.
Democrats unified against the bill as a tax giveaway to the rich paid for on the backs of the working class and the most vulnerable in society, what they called “trickle-down cruelty.”
Rep. Jeffries began his speech at 4:53 a.m. ET and finished at 1:37 p.m. — eight hours and 44 minutes later, a record — as he argued against what he called Trump’s “big, ugly bill.”
“We’re better than this,” Jeffries said, who used a leader’s prerogative for unlimited debate and read letter after letter from Americans writing about their reliance on the health-care programs.
“It’s a crime scene, going after the health and the safety and the well-being of the American people.”
Tensions ran high. As fellow Democrats chanted Jeffries’ name, a top Republican, Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, called his speech “a bunch of hogwash.”
Hauling the package through the Congress has been difficult from the start. Republicans have struggled mightily with the bill nearly every step of the way, quarrelling in the House and Senate and often succeeding only by the narrowest of margins: just one vote.
The U.S. Senate passed the package days earlier with U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance breaking the tie. The slim majority in the House left Republicans little room for defections.
“It wasn’t beautiful enough for me to vote for it,” said Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Also voting no was Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, also a Republican, who said he was concerned about cuts to Medicaid.
Once Johnson gavelled the tally, Republicans cheered “U.S.A.!” and flashed Trump-style thumbs-up to the cameras.
Despite their discomfort with various aspects of the sprawling package, in some ways it became too big to fail — in part because Republicans found it difficult to buck Trump.
As Wednesday’s stalled floor action dragged overnight, Trump railed against the delays. “What are the Republicans waiting for???” the president said in a midnight post on Truth Social. “What are you trying to prove???”
Johnson, the House Speaker, relied heavily on White House Cabinet secretaries, lawyers and others to satisfy skeptical GOP holdouts. Moderate Republicans worried about the severity of cuts while conservatives pressed for steeper reductions. Lawmakers said they were being told the administration could provide executive actions, projects or other provisions in their districts back home.
The alternative was clear. Republicans who staked out opposition to the bill, including Massie of Kentucky and Sen. Thom Tillis, were being warned by Trump’s well-funded political operation. Tillis soon after announced he would not seek re-election.
In many ways, the package is a repudiation of the agendas of the last two Democratic presidents, a chiselling-away at the Medicaid expansion from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and a pullback of Joe Biden’s climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Democrats have described the bill in dire terms, warning that cuts to Medicaid, which some 80 million Americans rely on, would result in lives lost. Food stamps that help feed more than 40 million people would “rip food from the mouths of hungry children, hungry veterans and hungry seniors,” Jeffries said.
Republicans say the tax breaks will prevent a tax hike on households and grow the economy. They maintain they are trying to rightsize the safety net programs and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse.
