House passes Big Beautiful Bill Act, sending it to Trump after bruising struggle
The GOP-led House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in a 218-214 vote Thursday following hours of relentless arm-twisting and deliberation that included the longest floor speech and longest procedural vote in the body's 236-year history.
In the end, just two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted against the measure after Trump held 11th-hour White House meetings Wednesday with more than a dozen holdouts — before deploying his Truth Social account in the final stretch.
'Largest Tax Cuts in History and a Booming Economy vs. Biggest Tax Increase in History, and a Failed Economy. What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT'S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!' Trump, 79, erupted just after midnight.
'FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE. RIDICULOUS!!!'
5 House Speaker Mike Johnson griped that he was 'not happy with what the Senate did to our product.'
REUTERS
5 President Trump had been mounting a pressure campaign on Republicans to send him the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
AFP via Getty Images
More than three hours later, the House voted 219-213 to begin debate on the bill, with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) the only GOPer to vote 'nay' after holdouts Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Keith Self of Texas and Victoria Spartz of Indiana flipped their votes to 'yea.'
'There couldn't be a more engaged and involved president,' said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who chalked up another narrow victory for the president's agenda.
'I genuinely believe that, because the Senate sent us a modified product, a lot of people just needed time to digest that [and] needed to understand exactly what those amendments and modifications were,' he later explained about the negotiations. 'So I gave them the space.'
Fiscal hawks and moderates alike had bristled at the Senate's modifications to the 870-page megabill, which cleared the upper chamber Tuesday in a 51-50.
Trump and GOP leadership were adamant that holdouts bite their tongue and vote for the bill to meet a self-imposed July 4 deadline for the president to sign it into law.
It features an extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, key provisions of which were set to expire at the end of the year; bolstered spending on border security, defense, and energy exploration; and discretionary spending cuts.
Republicans packaged those agenda items into a budget reconciliation bill to bypass the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and spent months delicately balancing competing interests within their razor-thin majorities in both chambers of Congress.
5 House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris had pushed for deeper cuts.
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Passage of the megabill was delayed by Tuesday night storms that held up several Republicans' return to Washington, DC, from their districts. One of the GOP holdouts, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who eventually came around, was stuck at the Capitol during his wife's birthday Thursday.
The final vote was further delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reading letters from constituents who expressed concern about their Medicaid benefits being stripped.
The House Democratic leader would end up using his 'magic minute' of debate against the bill to stall its passage for almost nine hours, shattering the record previously held by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in 2021 during his opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
'It's an utter waste of everyone's time, but you know, that's part of the system here,' Johnson groused to reporters about Jeffries' stall tactics.
'It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,' the speaker later clapped back during a floor speech just before voting on the actual bill took place.
The original House version of the megabill, which passed May 22, was projected to increase the deficit by about $3 trillion over the next decade, while the modified Senate version is set to add $3.9 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
5 Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie voted against nearly every iteration of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act due to his deficit concerns.
AP
The Senate had revamped the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to make key business tax cut extensions permanent, including credits for research and development expensing.
Fiscal hawks fumed over the impact on the deficit, moderates were vexed by the steeper cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 70 million low-income Americans.
Another sticking point was the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions, which had been a key priority of blue state Republicans and was raised to $40,000 for most Americans making below $500,000 per year for the next five years under the current bill.
During last-minute negotiations, the Trump administration indicated that it would look into executive actions to step up enforcement against illegal immigrants accessing Medicaid and find more savings, multiple reps told The Post.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) also confirmed that there were discussions of another reconciliation bill to address outstanding concerns, something that former holdouts pointed to after they came on board.
5 Senate Majority Leader John Thune oversaw the megabill's passage in the upper chamber earlier this week.
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What's in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
Here's a brief rundown of what's in the OBBA:
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