Trump's ‘One Big Beautiful Bill' passes the US House of Representatives

Al Jazeera

3 days ago

After nearly 29 hours of debate, the United States House of Representatives have passed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill', an enormous tax cut and spending package that represents a pillar of President Donald Trump's agenda.
The lower house of the US Congress voted by a margin of 218 to 214 in favour of the bill on Thursday.
All 212 Democratic members of the House opposed the bill. They were joined by Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who broke from the Republican majority.
After the bill's passage, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, the top Republican, applauded his fellow party members.
'I believed in this vision. I believed in the group. I believe in America,' Johnson said to applause.
The bill now heads to the White House for Trump to sign it into law. The Republican president had called on his fellow party members to pass the legislation before July 4, the country's Independence Day.
As a result of the new legislation, the US will lift its debt ceiling — the amount the federal government is allowed to borrow — by $5 trillion.
The bill also pours tens of billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, one of Trump's top priorities, and it will also cement the 2017 tax cuts that Trump championed during his first term as president.
To pay for those expenditures, the bill scales back social initiatives like Medicaid — government health insurance for low-income households — and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bill will increase the number of people without health insurance by 17 million over the next 10 years.
It also projected that the country's deficit — the amount of money the US owes — would climb by about $3.3 trillion over the same period.
Democratic lawmakers had slammed the bill as a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, noting that the tax cuts will mainly benefit the wealthiest earners.
Republican supporters like Trump have countered that the bill will fuel growth and cut waste and fraud in programmes like Medicaid.
Yet, not all conservatives initially backed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' as it wound its way through the chambers of Congress. There were several Republican holdouts who feared how the Medicaid cuts would impact low-income and rural communities, and some fiscal conservatives objected to the increase in the national debt.
'FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE,' Trump said in a social media post on Wednesday night. 'RIDICULOUS!!!'
Even Trump's erstwhile ally, billionaire Elon Musk, has publicly opposed the bill over provisions he described as 'pork'.
A record-breaking speech
In the lead-up to Thursday's vote, Democrats attempted to stall, with the stated aim of allowing voters more time to contact their local representatives in protest.
The face of that effort was Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who exercised a privilege known as the 'magic minute' that allows party leaders to speak as long as they want from the House floor.
Jeffries stretched that privilege into an hours-long appeal to Republicans to stand up against what he described as Trump's harmful policies. He started at around 4:53am local time (8:53 GMT) and ended past 1:39pm (17:39 GMT).
It was the longest speech ever delivered on the House floor, approximately eight hours and 44 minutes.
'I'm here to take my sweet time on behalf of the American people,' Jeffries told the House, his voice wavering at points during the speech.
He directed his remarks to the speaker of the House, a leadership role normally occupied by Johnson.
'Donald Trump's deadline may be Independence Day. That ain't my deadline,' Jeffries said. 'You know why, Mr Speaker? We don't work for Donald Trump. We work for the American people.'
Jeffries warned that the 'One Big Beautiful Bill', which he dubbed the 'One Big Ugly Bill', 'hurts everyday Americans and rewards billionaires with massive tax breaks'. The legislation, he added, was simply reckless.
He called his colleagues across the aisle to 'show John McCain-level courage', dropping a reference to the late Republican senator from Arizona, known for standing up to Trump on the question of healthcare.
McCain has often been cited as a symbol of bipartisanship in Congress, and Jeffries urged his Republican colleagues to reach across the aisle.
'We acknowledged the election of President Donald Trump, offered to work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle whenever and wherever possible in order to make life better for the American people,' Jeffries said.
'But the route, Mr Speaker, that has been taken by House Republicans is to go it alone and to try to jam this One Big Ugly Bill — filled with extreme right-wing policy priorities — down the throats of the American people.'
In a poll last week from Quinnipiac University, for example, just 29 percent of respondents indicated they were in favour of the legislation, while 55 percent were against it.
Jeffries later added, 'We're not here to bend the knee to any wannabe king,' comparing resistance to Trump to the US's revolutionary war era. When he finally said he would yield back the floor, Democrats exploded into applause, chanting his name: 'Hakeem! Hakeem! Hakeem!'
Republicans rally in final stretch
In order to reach Thursday's vote, the House had remained in session overnight, as part of a marathon session.
But in the minutes before the dramatic vote took place, Speaker Johnson himself briefly spoke to the House, rallying Republicans to show a unified front.
He also took a jab at Jeffries's record-breaking speech, 'It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth.'
'We've waited long enough. Some of us have literally been up for days now,' Johnson continued. 'With this One Big Beautiful Bill, we are going to make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before, and every American is going to benefit from that.'
He added that the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' would make programmes like Medicaid 'stronger with our reforms'.
Still, at the final hurdle, two Republicans did break away from their party caucus to vote against the 'One Big Beautiful Bill'.
One of the nay-votes, Representative Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, released a statement saying he had previously voted to 'strengthen Medicaid'. The Senate version of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill', he argued, did the opposite.
'The original House language was written in a way that protected our community; the Senate amendments fell short of our standard,' Fitzpatrick wrote.
'I believe in, and will always fight for, policies that are thoughtful, compassionate, and good for our community.'
Massie, meanwhile, had been a consistent holdout from the start. His sticking point, he said on social media, was the increase to the national debt.
'I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates,' he wrote.
A months-long process
It has been a long road for Republicans to reach Thursday's vote, stretching back months. The House first passed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' on May 22, in another overnight vote.
In that May vote, the legislation passed by the narrowest of margins, with 215 voting in favour and 214 against. Representatives Massie and Warren Davidson of Ohio joined a unified Democratic front in voting against the bill at that time, and Maryland's Andy Harris voted 'present'. Two more Republicans missed the vote entirely.
That propelled the bill to the Senate, where it faced another uphill battle. The 100-seat chamber has 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats and left-leaning independents.
To avoid facing a Democratic filibuster, Republicans subjected the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' to the Byrd Rule, which allows legislation to pass with a simple majority.
But in order to comply with the Byrd Rule, Republicans had to strike provisions that had little to no budget impact or increased the deficit outside of a 10-year window.
Still, the revised Senate version of the bill faced a nail-biter of a vote. On July 1, after another all-nighter, the vote was 50 to 50, with three Republicans siding with the Democrats. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaker to advance the bill.
Democrats did, however, notch a small symbolic victory, with Senator Chuck Schumer knocking the name 'One Big Beautiful Bill' off the final piece of legislation.
It was the Senate's version of the bill that the House voted on Thursday. At least one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has expressed distaste for the legislation since voting for its passage.
'It is the people of Alaska that I worry about the most, especially when it comes to the potential loss of social safety net programs — Medicaid coverage and SNAP benefits — that our most vulnerable populations rely on,' she wrote in a statement earlier this week.
'Let's not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process — a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution.'
The bill is expected to be signed into law on July 4 at 5pm US Eastern time (21:00 GMT) at a White House ceremony.