Washington (AFP) – US lawmakers teed up a final vote on Donald Trump’s marquee tax and spending bill Thursday after bruising Republican infighting nearly derailed the centerpiece of the president’s domestic agenda. Trump appeared close to 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 and launch a historic assault on the social safety net. The bill will be a major landmark in Trump’s political life and comes after he scored recent major wins, including in the Supreme Court and with US strikes that led to a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
Speaker Mike Johnson had struggled through the night to corral his rank-and-file Republican members after the package scraped past a series of “test” votes in the House of Representatives that laid bare deep divisions in the party. But after its last procedural hurdle in the early hours of Thursday, the bill was on course for a final vote that would put it on Trump’s desk to be signed into law. “No, I don’t think they caved,” an upbeat Johnson said of Republican holdouts. “They deserved that amount of time to go through it and figure out the meaning and how it would be applied, and ask questions of the administration.”
The timing of the vote slipped back as Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries continued a speech — lasting more than seven hours — opposing the bill in a tactic to delay proceedings.
Trump’s sprawling legislation squeezed through the Senate on Tuesday but had to return to the lower chamber for a rubber stamp of 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 food stamps program and forcing through the largest cuts to the Medicaid health insurance scheme for low-income Americans since its 1960s launch.
While Republican 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 had to negotiate tight margins and can likely only lose three lawmakers in the final vote, among more than two dozen who had previously 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. 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. Johnson had been clear that he banked on Trump leaning on waverers, as the president has in the past to turn around contentious votes that were headed for failure.
“What a great night it was. One of the most consequential Bills ever. The USA is the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, by far!!!” Trump said on social media Thursday as he scented victory. The bill underlines Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party in his second term and comes as he celebrates a Supreme Court ruling last week that curbed lone judges from blocking his radical policies.
But House Democrats have signaled that they plan to campaign on the bill to flip the House in the 2026 midterm elections, pointing to data showing that it represents a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Jeffries held the floor for his Democrats 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.
© 2024 AFP
