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Some House members are going to great lengths to make it back to to Washington for a vote on the Republican megabill after severe weather canceled dozens of flights.

President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are pushing to advance the Senate-approved version of Republicans’ agenda bill before July 4 – setting up a condensed timeframe for a House vote.

Many members had already returned to their districts and are now scrambling to return. But over 200 flights into Reagan National Airport were either cancelled or delayed Tuesday, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware.

Members in some cases are opting for a long road trip back into town before 9 a.m. Wednesday, the earliest voting is expected to begin.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) hosted a virtual town hall at the beginning of what he said was a 14-hour drive from his suburban Chicago home to Washington.

“We got some gas money, we got some snacks, and away we go,” he said in the town hall. “My GPS says I’m going to be there just in time.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said she’s planning to drive from Charleston, South Carolina to the capital – nearly an eight-hour drive, according to a screenshot of her GPS that she shared on social media.

Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) is planning to drive through the night back to Washington, he said in a video posted to X.

“The moment is too important to sit around and wait at an airport,” Fry said while driving from Myrtle Beach, SC.

Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump are digging in to pass Republicans’ massive tax and safety-net reform bill by Friday in time for a July 4 celebration. The biggest hurdle in their way right now: dozens of House Republican holdouts who are wary the bill doesn’t deliver on key promises they’ve made to their constituents.

From fiscal hawks to vulnerable centrists worried about the Senate’s steeper Medicaid cuts, a substantial cross-section of the House GOP conference would rather take the time to amend the package and send it back to the Senate. Head GOP rebel Chip Roy of Texas said Tuesday the chances of passing a bill out of the House by that deadline are “a hell of a lot lower than they were even 48 hours ago” based on what he saw of the Senate bill.

And, for now, some are openly questioning Trump’s push to “GET IT DONE” by July 4.

“We’ll see. I doubt it,” Roy said.

But the Republican holdouts’ options are not good. They can either defy Trump or fall in line as they’ve consistently done throughout the last few months.

GOP hardliner Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, as he entered the Rules Committee Tuesday afternoon, told reporters he was a “no” vote on the bill, and that he would oppose the rule on the floor and the bill for final passage.

“What we ought to do is take exactly the House bill that we sent over and go home and say, ‘When you’re serious, come back.’ That’s my message,” Norman said. “I’ll work all weekend.” Fellow Freedom Caucus member Andy Ogles followed up with a post also arguing for a delay. “If the House doesn’t pass the Senate’s version of the OBBB, then it turns into legislative ping-pong. But that’s okay,” Ogles wrote.

But GOP leaders quickly made clear that they intend to charge ahead to pass the legislation this week, and without changes.

“Everybody’s got different questions about pieces, but ultimately they recognize that this bill is still over 85 percent of what the House said,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Tuesday. “The plan is to bring it to the floor as the Senate sent it to us,” he added, noting leaders want to pass the legislation “as soon as possible.”

In a key sign of the bill’s momentum, influential budget hawks who have been key players in blocking the bill in recent months in order to forge better deals are not raising objections this time. It’s an acknowledgement that Trump and GOP leaders will push through the bill at any cost this week.

Still, Roy and other ultraconservatives have tried to push back on White House pressure to swallow the bill as is. He argued that Trump officials’ efforts to undercut fiscal hawks’ concerns about the legislation was “garbage.”

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), who frequently acquiesces to Trump’s pressure, also noted the Senate version “violates the minimum fiscal framework … by roughly half a trillion dollars.”

“So members will have a decision to make,” she said.

Another significant obstacle for GOP leaders are the dozens of GOP members concerned about deeper Medicaid cuts in the new bill. Many are in competitive districts and already shaken by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) torching his conference’s Medicaid provisions on the Senate floor shortly after he announced his retirement.

Johnson in recent days tried to push Senate GOP leaders to soften the Medicaid cuts in their bill, to no avail. Privately, he warned Republicans the Senate’s approach could lose House Republicans the majority in the midterms. But shortly after the Senate cleared the bill Tuesday, Johnson said he was still pushing to pass the bill by July 4. At the same time, he appeared to acknowledge the reservations among some members.

“They went a little further than any of us would have preferred,” Johnson told reporters.

The alarm among a swath of members about Medicaid has only escalated in recent days. On Monday, Johnson tried to calm anxious GOP members on a call with Main Street Caucus Republicans. But it went south for frustrated Republicans as Mehmet Oz, the Trump official who oversees Medicaid, insisted the Senate’s cuts went after waste, fraud and abuse. Even a swath of conservative House Republicans don’t want to vote on the Senate Medicaid cuts as they hear from their state hospital and the health care lobbies.

Other moderate House Republicans declined to weigh in on the Senate-passed bill. That includes Rep. Don Bacon, a key centrist Republican who announced this week he would not seek reelection.

“I’m keeping my powder dry,” he said.

Cassandra Dumay, Benjamin Guggenheim and Calen Razor contributed to this report.

Speaker Mike Johnson said he’s not happy with the sprawling legislation Senate Republicans just sent back to the House.

“I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product. We understand this is the process. It goes back and forth, and we’ll be working to get all of our members to yes,” Johnson said outside the House Rules Committee, which convened to debate the GOP megabill Tuesday afternoon.

“So high stakes, aggressive schedule, and we knew we would come to this moment,” Johnson said.

The comments come as conservatives like Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) are saying they won’t vote for the domestic policy legislation, which Senate Republicans passed on the thinnest of margins Tuesday afternoon after a grueling all-night vote-a-rama.

Norman told reporters outside the Rules committee that the House should send back its original plan to the Senate and leave town, instead of even considering the Senate Republican plan.

“My advice is to send the House bill back, pack our bags and go home and tell them to get serious,” Norman said of Senate Republicans.

“That math doesn’t work out. They’ve added $670 something billion dollars,” Norman said.

Shortly after Norman’s comments, Johnson huddled with Norman and fellow Rules committee and House Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy (R-Texas) in a room outside the committee.

Asked whether July 4 is still a realistic deadline for getting the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk, Johnson said, “We’ll see what happens in the next 24 hours.”

The House Homeland Security Committee’s Democratic members made allusions to Nazi Germany as they assailed “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades that President Donald Trump toured Tuesday.

“Historically, never a bad sign when fascists start building camps,” the committee posted on X on Tuesday alongside a video of Trump advocating for similar facilities in other states.

Trump visited the site alongside Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The governor, Trump’s onetime opponent in the 2024 Republican primary, has pledged his state’s support as the White House works to enact its sweeping mass deportation agenda.

Photos of the facility from Trump’s tour showed dozens of bunk beds arranged in cages inside a large tent.

“They want a bunch of people… interned…in a camp of some sorts…I wonder what we should call this?” the committee wrote in another post.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that these “unhinged comments by deranged leftists are despicable and warrant an immediate apology.” The facility, she added, “is a state-of-the-art facility with adequate beds, air-conditioning, on-site medical, and more,” comparing it favorably to conditions in the Biden administration.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) drew friendly fire from within his state’s congressional delegation, with Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) slamming him for his comments about missing his family’s “entire trip to the beach” during the megabill vote-a-rama.

“If you are here, you are damned lucky and privileged to be here. You should want to be here, and if you don’t want to be here, leave,” Boyle said in an interview with The Bulwark posted on Tuesday.

Boyle said he does not minimize the sacrifices made by lawmakers, but that he sat down with his young daughter this week to explain that “this week will determine whether or not millions and millions of Americans get to keep their health care.”

“She’s only 11, she got that,” he said.

The Senate passed the package Tuesday afternoon after pulling an all-nighter during a historic slew of amendments and votes on the floor. In the day before the Senate passed the bill, which ended in a 51-50 tie-break by Vice President JD Vance, Fetterman said he was “going to vote no.”

“Oh my god, I just want to go home,” he said to reporters Monday, saying it was clear the bill would pass.

Fetterman has increasingly faced criticism from Democrats for loudly breaking from party lines, as President Donald Trump called him “the most sensible” Democratic senator Friday.

“To me, I think this is one of the most important things I will ever do, full stop. There is no place I would rather be than right here, right now, and if I can make a difference and stop this bill from happening, I will do whatever it takes,” Boyle said in The Bulwark interview. “That should be the attitude, frankly, of every Democratic member of the House and Senate.”

President Donald Trump reiterated his demand that Congress pass Republicans’ agenda-defining megabill before July 4th, despite softening on that deadline as recently as Tuesday morning.

Trump urged House Republicans in a social media post on Tuesday afternoon to quickly pass the Senate-approved version of the sweeping domestic policy bill so he can sign before the holiday on Friday.

“We are on schedule — Let’s keep it going, and be done before you and your family go on a July 4thvacation,” Trump wrote.

Trump also called on House GOP leadership to ignore the “grandstanders” and unite the caucus, even as a pair of Republicans on the House Rules Committee have lambasted the Senate version of the bill, jeopardizing leadership’s ability to bring the bill to a floor vote quickly.

“To my GOP friends in the House: Stay UNITED, have fun, and Vote “YAY.” GOD BLESS YOU ALL!,” Trump wrote.

Prior to the Senate narrowly passing the bill on Tuesday, Trump told reporters he believed it would be “very hard” to get the bill passed in both chambers before July 4th.

Two Republican members of the House Rules Committee blasted the Senate-passed GOP megabill hours before the panel meets to prepare the legislation for a final decisive vote.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told reporters he currently opposes advancing the bill out of the Rules Committee after the Senate’s changes.

And Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a leader of the GOP’s ultraconservative bloc, warned that the odds of House passage of the party’s megabill by July 4 “are hell of a lot lower than they were even 48 hours ago” based on what’s come out of the Senate.

He also blasted members of President Donald Trump’s administration who have publicly blasted arguments that the bill isn’t fiscally sound — an apparent reference to White House budget director Russ Vought and even Vice President JD Vance.

“That is garbage,” said Roy, a member of the House Rules Committee. He added that he believes the Senate bill violates a budget framework House conservatives negotiated earlier this year: “I don’t think it’s close, especially if you add interest.”

If a third Rules Committee Republican balks, Speaker Mike Johnson would have a big issue getting the Senate bill to the House floor. But GOP leaders were confident Tuesday morning that would not be a problem.

It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected.

Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda more politically explosive.

GOP senators made steeper cuts to Medicaid, hastened cuts to wind and solar energy tax credits and also managed to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit compared to the House plan.

Usually, it’s far-right conservatives in the House proposing politically precarious policies, leaving the careful moderates in the Senate — the “cooling saucer,” according to the old Hill cliche — to dial them back.

This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP’s chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along.

That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had “miscalculated.”

“We are a more conservative body,” Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who “cringe at the sound of any word that starts with ‘Medi.’”

As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they’re not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts.

“We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That’s the main difference,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated.

No permanence enemies

In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders’ vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks.

“The bill includes over $500 billion in new spending, and at the end to get the vote of the Alaska senator, billions and billions more were added,” said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the three Republicans who voted against the bill Tuesday.

House members, he added, are “going to look at it and see that it’s much less conservative than it started out to be and it’s going to add much more to the debt.”

Strict Senate budget rules also meant that some House spending cuts had to be scaled back or dropped altogether, so senators had to dig deep to find offsets elsewhere — especially given the $466 billion cost of adding the permanent business tax cuts to the bill versus just extending them through 2029, as the House did.

Yet there was no serious discussion about leaving those tax cuts behind. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo and other tax-writing Republicans considered it their top priority. Thune called it a red line for many of his members, and it was one that ultimately influenced some of the Senate’s most politically fraught decisions.

Thune drove a strategy that cut more deeply into Medicaid that many expected.

In an interview after the bill’s passage, Thune acknowledged that the decision to make the business tax cuts permanent impacted the savings and overall strategy for the bill.“We really believed that permanence was the key to economic growth because it creates certainty,” he said. “All the models that we saw showed that you got more growth with permanence.”

To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump’s marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses.

Even more explosive, however, is how they chose to wring additional savings out of Medicaid. The joint federal-state health program had already emerged as a political hornet’s nest in the House, where members balked at various proposals that would turn off the federal money spigot and force states to kick residents off their health plans.

Eventually the House landed on a compromise proposal of capping medical provider taxes, a popular financing mechanism for state Medicaid programs. Many Republicans objected, but it beat several alternatives, such as explicitly reducing the federal cost share formula for Medicaid enrollees.

Medicaid backlash

Many Republican senators prepared to make their peace with the proposal, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said in a Monday interview that he was privately prepared to accept the House’s provider tax cap with minor tweaks after a hospital association in his state formally blessed it.

But before Hawley could announce his support, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft that discarded the freeze and instead drastically scaled down the tax. Instead of waving a white flag, Hawley went on the warpath, urging Thune to drop the Senate proposal and backchanneling with House leadership to undermine it.

Hawley, who described himself as “stunned” by the Senate’s provider tax language, said he never got an explanation for why leadership went down that route. In the interview, he held up and rubbed his fingers together — indicating that he believed they were looking for money.

“I think it’s a matter of our mark, the Senate mark, made a lot more of the business tax cuts permanent,” he said.

While leadership was ultimately able to get Hawley on board — he won approval for a radiation victims compensation fund he’s championed and other smaller goodies — the decision to go deeper on Medicaid lost Republicans two key senators during the final vote on Tuesday afternoon — Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis.

Collins and Tillis ended up being two of the three

Both purple-state senators urged the Senate to revert to the House Medicaid language. Tillis privately warned leaders the Senate proposal would devastate his state and cost him reelection. Days later, he announced he would not run again and publicly torched the bill, saying it would “betray the promise Donald Trump made.”

The Senate’s Medicaid swerve has also put Speaker Mike Johnson in a bind. When he was locking down support for the House to pass its version of the bill, he privately reassured his members that the Senate would soften his chamber’s Medicaid cuts. Over the past week, he continued to reiterate to them that the Senate would end up closer to what the House passed. Now, he has to explain to increasingly frustrated House moderates why that didn’t happen.

But even as House Republicans were publicly banking on the Senate to soften the Medicaid cuts, Senate Republicans were pushing to go further. During an early June Finance Committee meeting with Trump at the White House, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming described to the president how the provider tax amounted to “money laundering” and would constitute cracking down on fraud, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions.

The parliamentarian and the billionaire

Other unpredictable events forced Senate Republicans to lose out on hundreds of billions of dollars in savings. After lengthy debates between Republican and Democratic staff in June, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that upward of $200 billion in House offsets would have to be left out of the bill because they didn’t comply with Senate budget rules.

House Republicans had also banked on $116 billion in revenue from retaliatory taxes aimed at dissuading foreign countries from implementing digital levies and a global minimum tax that the GOP detests. Shortly after the Senate included the proposal in its text — and a freakout by analysts on Wall Street — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a deal with G7 countries on the global tax and asked for the retaliatory taxes to be removed.

Other changes, like sharp cuts to certain clean-energy tax credits, seemed spurred more by politics than fiscal considerations. After the megabill passed the House in May, far-right influencers and lawmakers got increasingly vocal about what they perceived as deeply unfair subsidies to green industries.

Trump began calling Thune to urge him to take an axe to wind and solar energy incentives that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden, even after softened language backed by Senate moderates was inserted into the Finance Committee text. Trump told the same to Senate conservatives, many of whom had been swayed by fossil-fuel advocate Alex Epstein. They invited Epstein to address a Senate lunch in June to win over skeptical colleagues.

Bessent's late interventions killed a major source of tax-cut offsets.

Even a late intervention from the world’s richest man couldn’t move the needle. Elon Musk publicly lashed out at Republicans for scaling back the tax credits, including making a public appeal to Speaker Mike Johnson to keep them online. He also personally approached Thune in recent days as the Senate debated the bill. Thune declined to comment on the conversation, but afterward Musk continued attacking the bill, arguing that it would hurt America’s ability to compete with China.

Senate holdouts did manage to clinch the removal of a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects in 11th-hour negotiations, as well as a carve-out from the phaseouts for projects that start construction immediately. But the harsh language pushed by Epstein, which required most other wind and solar projects to be placed in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the incentives, stayed in the final Senate product.

Tillis, liberated of political niceties after announcing his retirement, railed against the clean-energy changes on the Senate floor on Sunday, arguing that they would gut power projects that are already being developed.

Taking aim at Epstein, Tillis chalked up the changes to “people who have never worked a day in this industry, maybe philosophized and written a few white papers on it, but haven’t gotten their hands dirty.”

Ben Jacobs contributed to this report.

Several former top aides to former President Joe Biden agreed to interview with the House Oversight Committee as part of its probe of Biden’s mental acuity while in office.

The committee scheduled former chief of staff Ron Klain to interview on July 24; former counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti for July 30; former senior adviser to the president Mike Donilon for July 31; former deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed for Aug. 5; and former senior advisor to the president Anita Dunn for Aug. 7, according to an Oversight aide.

Neera Tanden, Biden’s former director of the Domestic Policy Council, recently sat for an interview with the committee. Chair James Comer, who’s mulling a bid for Kentucky governor, has issued subpoenas to Biden physician Kevin O’Connor and former assistant to the president Anthony Bernal for their depositions.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski made the “agonizing” decision to vote for Senate Republicans’ version of the “big, beautiful” bill after winning key concessions on federal health and food-aid programs for her state.

“Did I get everything I wanted? Absolutely not,” Murkowski told reporters after the vote.

But Murkowski touted changes she secured to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that would allow for “greater flexibility” for Alaska and extra support for rural hospitals “that is going to be very key.” Senate Republicans also removed a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects — a change Murkowski had pushed for. She also said she wanted to see President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts extended.

“I had to look on balance, because the people in my state are the ones that I put first,” Murkowski said. “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

Murkowski said she’s urged both the White House and top Hill Republicans to send the bill to conference rather than ramming it back through the House this week, and slammed the “artificial” timeline Trump and GOP leaders had set of speeding the bill to his desk by July 4.

“I’ve urged the White House that I think that more process is needed to this bill, because I would like to see a better outcome for people in this country,” she said.

Trump appeared to waver on his July 4 deadline Tuesday, telling reporters “I think it’s very hard to do.”