House Republicans one vote away from passing Trump’s massive budget bill : NPR
The president of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., Leaves the room of the room during a procedural vote on the Big Beautiful Bill Act at the American Capitol on Wednesday. Johnson managed to tinker with the necessary votes to adopt the final rule of the bill, preparing the house for a final passage before a self-imposed deadline of July 4.
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tilting legend
Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images
After a vote that remained open for several hours while the president of the Mike Johnson Chamber, R-La., Tried to convince Five Holdouts to advance the legislation on the signing of President Trump, the Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republicans of the Chamber erased a key obstacle, putting the bill for the final adoption before an autonomous deadline of July 4.
We do not know what Johnson concessions made, if necessary, to obtain the support of some legislators who held the vote. With just a narrow majority in the House, the Republicans could not afford to lose three votes. The final count was 219-213.
The persistence of Johnson allowed him, as well as other Republican leaders, to bring together enough support to advance the bill while sailing on this thin majority and a multitude of internal divisions of the party.
At the heart of the legislation is an extension of the tax discounts of President Trump 2017. This would also end taxes on advice and overtime, at least temporarily, which was one of the major campaign promises that Trump made.
The bill also includes new expenses for the application of defense and immigration, and it increases the country’s debt limit by $ 5.
To pay this, the bill reduces expenses in a range of programs, including Medicaid, the joint federal and state program which provides health care at around 70 million low -income, old and disabled Americans.
The first estimates suggest that around 11 million people could lose coverage as part of the GOP bill, and this is one of the main reasons why negotiations around this bill were so controversial in the two chambers.
Overall, the sprawling GOP bill – traveling nearly 1,000 pages – represents a spectacular realignment of the role of the federal government in American life, by passing resources from the social security net and investments in clean energy, and by redirecting them to finance billions of dollars in new expenses in tax reductions, by applying immigration and national defense.
Then, the legislators will debate the public prosecutor’s bill. Once done, they can proceed to a final vote.
It is a process that could take several more hours, but assuming that the Republicans have the votes, they will have made their promises to have this bill at the office of President Trump by Friday.
Even with its probable passage, the fight against this bill is far from over. The Democrats clearly indicated that they planned to make this legislation the centerpiece of their thrust to gain control of the congress during the mid-term elections of 2026.
