House Narrowly Passes ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ in Victory for Johnson, Trump

WASHINGTON — The House early Thursday narrowly passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a massive piece of legislation that would extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and significantly advance the domestic policy of his second administration.

As narrow as it was, the 215-214 vote was a crucial victory both for the president and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., marking the first time the Republican-led Congress has marshalled a major piece of legislation through the chamber in the face of solidly unified Democratic opposition.

“After a long week and a long night and countless hours of work over the past year, a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork, my friends, it quite literally is morning in America,” Johnson said ahead of the vote, at the conclusion of a night-long debate on the House floor.

“After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America First agenda is finally here, and we are advancing that today.”

In the end, after days of intra-party disagreements over specifics in the bill, only two Republicans voted against it – Reps. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, and Warren Davidson, of Ohio, both of whom expressed dismay at the legislation’s potential impact on the federal deficit over the next decade.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the legislation is expected to add an estimated $2.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.

“This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” Massie said on the House floor ahead of the vote. “We’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We’re putting coal in the burner and setting a course for the iceberg.”

Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, had also threatened to be a no vote as recently as Monday, but on Thursday morning he voted “present,” logging a protest vote that in no way threatened the bill’s passage.

Two other Republicans who threatened to vote against the bill, Reps. Andrew Garbarino, of New York, and David Schweikert of Arizona, did not show up to vote.

Johnson later explained that neither missed the vote intentionally — he said Garbarino had fallen asleep and Schweikert simply didn’t get his voting card in on time.

Johnson had worked feverishly for days to corral every vote he could, and early Thursday morning he unveiled a series of changes to the bill to win over the last holdouts.

These changes include an increase in the state and local tax deduction sought by blue-state Republicans, and the acceleration of new work requirements for medicaid that many conservative members wanted.

The revisions also included an expanded rescission of clean energy tax credits included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Under the new rules, companies building wind, solar, geothermal and battery storage facilities will only be able to claim the Biden-era tax credits if they start construction within 60 days of the bill being signed into law, and then only if their facility will be put into service by the end of 2028.

At present no one knows what the last-minute changes in the bill will cost.

“Take this as a lesson: Don’t bet against House Republicans,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., during a post-vote press conference. “This is a big one, and once again, they have been proven wrong.”

In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said the passage of the bill “is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” 

“Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson, and the House Leadership, and thank you to every Republican who voted YES on this Historic Bill! Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! There is no time to waste.”

Though the president and Republicans in the House understandably took a victory lap Thursday morning, the bill’s fate in the Senate is uncertain.

A number of conservatives in the chamber have indicated they want steeper cuts to Medicaid and other social programs to substantially reduce the cost of the bill and get a handle on the deficit.

Moderates and those representing swing districts where voter anger will make them more likely to be tossed out, are pushing to shield Medicaid from further cuts and want to keep the clean energy tax credits.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries suggested his Republican colleagues should have had similar concerns and predicted they will rue the day they voted in favor of the bill.

“When the story is told of the 119th Congress … this day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States,” he said.