Congress

The megabill will soon be megalaw

Published

12 months ago

July 3, 2025

House Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill Thursday after nearly 24 hours of nonstop angst, discord and hands-on pressure from President Donald Trump and allies — ultimately uniting to deliver his top legislative priority.

The 218-214 final vote is a major victory for congressional Republicans who pledged to send the bill to Trump’s desk before July 4. Speaker Mike Johnson muscled the bill through in the early-morning hours after a full day of meetings with holdouts, huddles on the House floor and gatherings of different factions at the White House.

One preliminary vote Wednesday was held open for more than nine hours — what Democrats claimed was a new House record — as GOP leaders scrambled to secure the votes. Once they did, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed final action almost another nine hours with a record-breaking floor speech attacking the 887-page bill.

The decisive vote ended up almost entirely along party lines. Only Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposition to the bill.

What was not clear upon passage is what precisely a small band of holdouts, most of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, had secured in return for their votes. They were irate about changes that had been made to the bill in the Senate, but GOP leaders were insistent that no further tweaks would be made — which would require another time-consuming trip across Capitol Hill.

The holdouts had been discussing the possibility of executive actions and other promises pertaining to the implementation of the sweeping legislation. But Johnson insisted no deals were cut.

“We find out where the red lines are, and we try to navigate around them and get a product that everybody can buy into,” he told reporters.

Angry Democrats, who had been left in a holding pattern most of the day Wednesday and deep into the night, seethed at the situation.

“I have no idea what in the world the crowd that was holding out got for holding out,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on the floor. “Does anyone know? It is a complete mystery to me and to the American people.”

To most Republicans, however, final passage came as a relief after more than six months of intensive intraparty debates and negotiations about how the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda should be structured and what should be included.

The centerpiece was always set to be an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature bill of Trump’s first term. But Republicans quickly sparred over whether those tax cuts — a legislative hornet’s nest — should be packaged together with other, easier-to-pass GOP priorities or lopped off to pass separately.

Trump sided with lawmakers, mainly in the House, who wanted to pass the whole domestic agenda in one piece, and what Trump would deem the “one big, beautiful bill” was born. On top of the tax package, which eventually swelled in excess of $4 trillion, were defense spending boosts, increased immigration enforcement and dramatic changes to some safety-net programs to help offset the costs.

Republicans seized on rosy projections from White House economists while most independent analysts concluded the bill’s economic impacts would be relatively modest.

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) touted the “largest tax cut in U.S. history” Thursday morning and promised a flurry of economic benefits, despite the bill mainly continuing tax policies already in place.

“We can expect record job growth, investment, repatriation of capital back to the United States, record-low unemployment, record-high wage growth and the lowest poverty rates in recorded history,” he said.

While the tax cuts were the glue meant to hold GOP support for the bill together, it was not always clear that hard-line fiscal hawks and moderate purple-district Republicans would be able to come to terms on a single piece of legislation.

Those concerns were amplified after the Senate reshaped the bill the House passed in late May, making steeper cuts to Medicaid and speeding up the rollback of wind and solar energy tax credits, while also adding hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit than the House-passed bill did.

Key blocs of House Republicans initially blanched at the changes, leading to hours of meetings Wednesday between GOP leadership and holdouts in an effort to quell the rebellion. With further changes to the bill off the table, lawmakers talked up the possibility of future executive actions from Trump. White House Budget Director Russ Vought came to the Capitol to discuss the possibility of future spending cuts with hard-liners and how exactly the administration planned to target key programs.

Meanwhile, among purple-district Republicans nervous about a roughly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, there were major concerns over how medical providers in their districts might be able to access a limited $50 billion fund for rural hospitals created in the Senate and whether the funding patch would be enough to compensate for cuts elsewhere.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the Senate-passed megabill would increase the number of people without health insurance by roughly 11.8 million in 2034. That estimate was posted before a slate of last-minute changes were made to the bill before Senate passage earlier this week.

Democrats vowed Republicans would pay a steep political price for passing the megabill, with some comparing it to the health care bill Republicans abandoned in 2017 — preceding a GOP House wipeout in the subsequent midterms. In speeches throughout the day, Democratic leaders name-checked purple-district Republicans whose districts they hope to target in next year’s midterm elections.

The minority party had few tools to stop the bill’s passage, and their plans to at least slow it down were at first overtaken by the GOP’s own snail-like progress. But then Jeffries used his unlimited speaking time Thursday morning to lash into what he called “one big, ugly bill” that coddled billionaires, undermined clean energy production and slashed the social safety net, delaying passage until Thursday afternoon.

“I ask the question, if Republicans were so proud of this one big ugly bill, why did the debate begin at 3:28 a.m. in the morning?” Jeffries said at the outset of his speech, accusing Republicans of trying to “jam this bill through the House of Representatives under the cover of darkness.”

Jeffries took special aim at the bill’s health care cuts — reading story after story from Americans who rely on Medicaid for their medical needs and calling out the particular Republican lawmakers who represent them. He also mocked Trump’s insistence that he would protect the program.

“He was going to ‘love and cherish’ Medicaid,” he said. “Nothing about this bill ‘loves and cherishes’ Medicaid. It guts Medicaid.”

The bill now heads to Trump’s desk, and he’s expected to sign it on the holiday, Johnson told reporters: “We’ll do that on July 4, potentially, maybe right before the B-2s fly. I mean you just can’t script this any better.”

David Lim and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.

Congress

Senate votes to halt Iran war despite Trump’s push for peace deal

Published

50 minutes ago

June 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate on Tuesday voted to cut off the U.S. military campaign against Iran, handing a fresh loss to President Donald Trump despite his attempts to convince lawmakers and the public that a deal to end the war is at hand.

Four Republicans broke ranks to help approve a resolution to block further military action unless it is green-lighted by Congress.

The war powers measure is largely symbolic — the resolution cleared Tuesday doesn’t go to the president to sign or veto. But the bipartisan 50-48 vote is a damaging milestone for the Trump administration: Both the Senate and House have now weighed in against the Middle East conflict that’s stretched on for more than 100 days. The same measure passed the House in early June after months of close calls.

Congress

Housing bill threatened in GOP elections-bill spat

Published

1 hour ago

June 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The long-anticipated bipartisan housing bill is under threat from a Florida Republican who threatened to “shut the floor down” if House GOP leaders move forward with passing it Tuesday.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said Republicans instead need to prioritize passage of the SAVE America Act, the GOP elections bill that has been stuck in the Senate for months. Speaker Mike Johnson has scheduled a Tuesday evening vote on the housing bill in hopes of sending it to President Donald Trump for a planned Wednesday signing at the White House.

Luna posted her threat on social media Tuesday afternoon and later specified in an interview that she would oppose procedural measures teeing up GOP-backed legislation going forward if party leaders didn’t abandon their plans to hold the housing bill vote via special fast-track procedures that would effectively sideline Republican hard-liners.

Luna cannot single-handedly block those procedural votes, but she said there is “a group” of lawmakers who would join her. She separately called on Trump to veto the housing bill in a bid to force the SAVE America Act to be added to it.

Johnson plans for now to proceed with the Tuesday evening vote on the housing bill, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. If Luna and her unnamed allies follow through with their threats, they could derail a pair of appropriations bills set for House consideration this week and potentially freeze the floor indefinitely given the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

“I have been telling them,” Luna said of her complaints to GOP leaders.

Congress

Top tech executives expected to testify at July 28 Senate hearing

Published

2 hours ago

June 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate Judiciary Committee is tentatively planning to have top tech executives testify at a July 28 hearing, according to five people with knowledge of the committee’s plans granted anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had previously summoned the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Google to a hearing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, to discuss their online child safety practices, AI safety and other topics.

“Chairman Grassley looks forward to a productive hearing as he continues his bipartisan efforts to get lifesaving child safety legislation signed into law,” a spokesperson for Grassley told Blue Light News.

The hearing, which remains provisional, comes at a pivotal moment for the tech sector. Congress is actively debating legislation aimed at protecting children online, while courts and state attorneys general are intensifying pressure on social media companies over allegations that their platforms harm young users.

The list of tech executives the committee is eyeing to testify remains in flux but currently includes head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, according to the five people. Three of the people said Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and CEO of TikTok’s U.S.-based joint venture company Adam Presser may also be called to attend.

The four companies did not immediately comment on the proposed hearing.