Seventeen Republicans joined Democrats in passing legislation Thursday that would revive enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years, rebuffing opposition from GOP leadership.

The 230-196 vote follows a procedural vote Wednesday to advance the bill, where nine Republicans joined Democrats in favor of moving forward.

Thursday’s final passage vote had eight additional Republicans supporting the bill, including House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino of New York and Rep. David Joyce of Ohio, a senior appropriator.

While the measure is destined to die in the Senate, some Republicans hope it will lay the groundwork for a bipartisan agreement to tame skyrocketing health insurance premiums — the result of Congress allowing the tax credits to lapse Dec. 31.

“The Senate could put together a product that could ultimately get sent back over to the House that we can then conference on and hopefully move across the finish line,” said Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), who supported the Democratic-led bill.

A bipartisan group of senators are scrambling to make headway on a framework that could extend the credits while instituting new income caps for eligibility and lengthening the ACA open enrollment period to soften the blow of premium hikes.

The lawmakers continue to project optimism about reaching a deal, though thorny issues remain over how to address the so-called Hyde amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortion.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope the House vote will pressure Republican leaders in both chambers to compromise on the issue. At a news conference Thursday morning, House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer blasted Republicans for repeatedly refusing to back a clean extension before the subsidies expired last year.

“The American people should ask [Senate Majority Leader John Thune], ‘Are you willing to put this bill that the House now is moving forward on the floor of the Senate?’” Schumer said. “Most of the Republicans in the House and the Senate want to put poison pill riders about abortion on it. They are standing in the way.”

Jeffries is now especially emboldened, having made the calculation last fall that enough centrist Republicans would join Democrats in supporting a discharge petition to circumvent their own leadership and force a vote on three-year extension legislation.

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck effort that Democrats are committed to, to make sure we lower the high cost of living,” said Jeffries. “We’ll see what Republicans are willing to do to keep their word that they promised to lower the high cost of living in America.”

The question of whether to extend the enhanced subsidies, which were established in a 2021 Covid relief package under a Democratic majority, has been one of the most divisive policy issues of the 119th Congress.

Republican moderates started raising alarms early in the fall that their constituents were staring down massive premium spikes in 2026 due to the looming expiration of the subsidies. But they quickly encountered strong headwinds from conservatives who lambasted the credits as rife with fraud and giveaways to insurance companies — a message that has been echoed by Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

Johnson’s office, in a last-ditch effort Thursday morning to undermine the effort, blasted out a memo accusing “Democrats [of] want[ing] to expand a COVID subsidy system already flagged for massive fraud and abuse, with absolutely zero reforms.”

Many Republicans also chafed at the prospect of voting to bolster Obamacare — which they have sought unsuccessfully to repeal dozens of times since its passage in 2010 — and demanded restrictions be put in place to bar the tax credits from going to plans that cover abortion services using separate funding, a nonstarter for Democrats.

The GOP moderates attempted to secure a deal with Johnson last fall to secure a floor vote to extend the subsidies as an amendment to a Republican-authored bill intended to lower health care costs, but talks broke down. It led four Republicans to agree to help Democrats get the requisite 218 signatures on their discharge petition to force a vote on the three-year extension bill.

The bipartisan duo that spearheaded efforts to force the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files is now asking a federal judge to appoint an official to oversee the process.

This new request from Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) comes as the DOJ is under criticism from members of both parties for not complying with the law Congress passed late last year, which mandated the department to make materials related to the late convicted sex offender public by Dec. 19.

The department, instead, has been rolling out documents in tranches, with redactions Massie, Khanna and others say go beyond what they outlined in their legislation.

“Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act,” Massie and Khanna wrote to Judge Paul E. Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, who is overseeing the case against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. “Absent an independent process, as outlined above, we do not believe the DOJ will produce the records that are required by the Act and what it has represented to this Court.”

The two lawmakers are asking Engelmayer to appoint a so-called special master, or independent monitor, to preside over the continued release — a court-appointed administrator who would ensure the administration follows the law.

A judge has wide discretion to appoint a special master, and judges sometimes take such a step in cases where there are a large number of documents and questions of privilege. A special master is often a retired federal judge.

The judge who oversaw the case against Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, appointed a special master to review the documents seized from Cohen’s properties to assess which were subject to attorney-client privilege, for example.

It’s not clear if Engelmayer might be inclined to appoint a special master.

Massie and Khanna criticized the limited roll-out of materials and the extensive redactions. They also note their bill required Attorney General Pam Bondi to provide details on redactions, which was not submitted to Congress by the statutory deadline.

“The court can rule fairly quickly,” Massie told reporters Thursday. “Pam Bondi is in communication with this judge about the document production … we are stepping in and offering our opinion on what would be helpful.”

“We believe they’re over-redacting material,” he continued. “And they’re also releasing it in a manner as to just flood the channel with stuff that doesn’t matter while they withhold the things that do matter.”

Massie and Khanna have also threatened to hold Bondi in “inherent contempt” — a long-dormant congressional power — over her department’s handling of the case. Massie said Thursday that their effort to pursue that mechanism was still ongoing, but that he is currently focused on the effort to appoint a special master.

“I think it’s the quickest way to produce, to expedite the document production, because these lawyers at the DOJ understand what judges can do in courtrooms,” he added. “And they are already communicating with that judge, even though they’re not communicating with us.”

The House voted Thursday not to overturn a pair of vetoes President Donald Trump made to legislation on a Colorado water pipeline and a Florida flood control project — despite Congress passing the bills with no objections last month.

The votes represented the first attempted veto overrides of the Republican-controlled House, following what were Trump’s first vetoes of his second term in office. And while Trump has acknowledged that his vetoes were for political reasons, most of the House GOP declined to override him.

The vote to uphold the veto of a water infrastructure project bill in Colorado, which is currently ensnared in the administration’s fight with the state’s Congressional delegation over cuts to a local climate center, got 248 votes, short of the 285 two-thirds majority needed for an override. Just 35 Republicans joined all 213 Democrats in voting for it.

That project sits in the district of Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who also defied Trump and earned the White House’s ire by supporting a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill compelling the Justice Department’s full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“I will continue to fight for Western water. This was a commitment made by President Trump in 2020 and I will continue to fulfill that commitment,” Boebert told reporters after the vote Thursday.

The House also voted 236-188 to uphold Trump’s veto of legislation that would support the local Miccosukee Tribe, which has been at odds with the White House over the administration’s plans to build its “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center. The bill was endorsed by Florida’s Republican senators and several GOP members of the Florida delegation in the House.

Twenty-four Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted to overturn the veto, with one Republican, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, voting “present.” That bill needed 284 votes to override.

Lawmakers in both parties charged that Trump’s unexpected vetoes shortly after Christmas were political retribution for people who had opposed his agenda.

Trump justified his veto of the water pipeline bill by calling Colorado Democrat Jared Polis a “bad governor.” State officials have refused to pardon former Republican election official Tina Peters for her convictions last year related to efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 president election, which Trump lost.

The president accused Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe, which would be allowed under the other bill to carry out construction projects to protect a village from flooding, of trying to obstruct his immigration policies by suing to stop a migrant detention center near their land.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.