(AFP) – US lawmakers teed up a final vote on Donald Trump’s marquee tax and spending bill for Thursday morning after bruising Republican infighting nearly derailed the centerpiece of the president’s domestic agenda. Almost 24 hours after debate began, Trump appeared close to a major victory as Congress edged towards passing his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” despite misgivings in his party over a text that would balloon the national debt while launching a historic assault on the social safety net.
Speaker Mike Johnson struggled through the night to corral his rank-and-file members after the package scraped through a series of “test” votes in the House of Representatives that laid bare deep divisions in the party. It was on course for a final vote that would put it on Trump’s desk to be signed into law after passing its last procedural hurdle in the early hours of Thursday. “We feel very good about where we are and we’re moving forward,” an upbeat Johnson told reporters at the Capitol. “So we’re going to deliver the Big, Beautiful Bill — the president’s ‘America First’ agenda — and we’re going to do right by the American people.”
The timetable could slip, however, as Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries continued a long speech opposing the bill that delayed proceedings by several hours. Originally approved by the House in May, Trump’s sprawling legislation squeezed through the Senate on Tuesday but had to return to the lower chamber for a rubber stamp of the senators’ revisions. The package honors many of Trump’s campaign promises, boosting military spending, funding a mass migrant deportation drive, and committing $4.5 trillion to extend his first-term tax relief. But it is expected to pile an extra $3.4 trillion over a decade onto the country’s fast-growing deficits while shrinking the federal food stamps program and forcing through the largest cuts to the Medicaid health insurance scheme for low-income Americans since its 1960s launch.
While moderates in the House are anxious that the cuts will damage their prospects of reelection, fiscal hawks chafed over savings that they say fall far short of what was promised. Johnson has to negotiate tight margins and can likely only lose three lawmakers in the final vote, among more than two dozen who had declared themselves open to rejecting Trump’s bill.
The 869-page text only passed in the Senate after a flurry of tweaks that pulled the House-passed version further to the right. It offsets its tax relief with around $1 trillion in health care cuts, and some estimates put the total number of recipients set to lose their insurance coverage under the bill at 17 million. Scores of rural hospitals are expected to close due to the cuts. Most legislation in the House has to run the gauntlet of multiple preliminary votes before it can come up for final approval.
But there was alarm early on as the One Big Beautiful Bill stumbled at one of its first procedural stages, with a vote that ought to have been straightforward remaining open for seven hours and 31 minutes — making it the longest in House history. Johnson had been clear that he was banking on Trump leaning on waverers, as the president has in the past to turn around contentious House votes that were headed for failure. The Republican leader has spent weeks hitting the phones and hosting White House meetings to cajole lawmakers torn between angering welfare recipients at home and incurring his wrath. “FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE. RIDICULOUS!!!” Trump thundered in one of multiple posts to his Truth Social platform that sounded increasingly frustrated as Wednesday’s marathon voting session spilled into Thursday.
House Democrats have signaled that they plan to campaign on the bill to flip the chamber in the 2026 midterm elections, pointing to analyses showing that it represents a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Jeffries held the floor for his Democrats for more than three hours ahead of the final vote, as he told the stories of everyday Americans whom he argued would be harmed by Trump’s legislation. “This bill, this one big, ugly bill — this reckless Republican budget, this disgusting abomination — is not about improving the quality of life of the American people,” he said.
– Frankie TAGGART
© 2024 AFP
