Trump policy bill clears Congress after House GOP quells revolt
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
By MICHAEL GOLD, ROBERT JIMISON and MEGAN MINEIRO
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 Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.
The final vote, 218-214, was mostly along party lines and came after Speaker Mike Johnson spent a frenzied day and night toiling to quell resistance in his own ranks that threatened until the very end to derail the president’s signature measure. With all but two Republicans in favor and Democrats uniformly opposed, the action cleared the bill for 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 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 Joe Biden that 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 Trump, who is expected to swiftly sign what he has frequently referred to as his “big, beautiful bill.” Republican 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,” Johnson said, extolling the bill before 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 in next year’s midterm elections.
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 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 8 1/2 hours, breaking the chamber’s record and delaying a final vote well into the afternoon, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., 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, 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 next year’s 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,” 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 deeply divided their party, Republicans in both the House and Senate made it clear that they, too, were deeply uncomfortable with parts of it, vocally criticizing its flaws before most of them ultimately banded together to pass it.
The House devolved into paralysis Wednesday and into Thursday morning in the hours before the final vote, as a handful of Republicans withheld their votes to bring up the measure.
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, Johnson eked out 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 Trump.
The bill squeaked through the Senate by the narrowest of margins Tuesday. But the changes that senators made to cobble together support for it exacerbated deep internal divides among House Republicans that have plagued their efforts to advance 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 during next year’s midterm elections were wary of the biggest cuts to popular government programs.
One member of each faction voted against the bill Thursday: Reps. Thomas Massie, a fiscal hawk from a deep-red district in Kentucky who had railed against the high cost of the bill, and 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.