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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.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is now delivering the longest speech in House history, holding the floor for more than eight hours to delay passage of Republicans’ domestic policy megabill.

His so-called magic minute, as the unlimited speaking time granted to party leaders is known, breaks a record set by Republican Kevin McCarthy in 2021, which in turn exceeded the mark set by Nancy Pelosi in 2018. All were serving as minority leader at the time.

Starting at 4:52 a.m., Jeffries used his hours of speaking time to read letters from constituents who could be affected by cuts to social safety-net programs and to single out purple-district Republicans who are in line to support the legislation whose districts Democrats plan to target in next year’s midterms.

The speech is Democrats’ last option to slow down the megabill ahead of a final passage vote. It’s still expected to pass later Thursday, ahead of the GOP’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.

“I’m here today to make it clear that I’m going to take my time and ensure that the American people fully understand how damaging this bill will be to their quality of life,” he said, later adding: “Donald Trump’s deadline may be Independence Day. That ain’t my deadline.”

Republicans largely shrugged off Jeffries’ speech, which set the new record at 1:25 p.m. after eight hours and 33 minutes. Speaker Mike Johnson called it “an utter waste of everyone’s time, but that’s part of the system here.”

Unlike in the Senate, debate time in the House is typically strictly limited, but there is an exception for top party leaders, who are allowed to speak without interruption under chamber precedent.

Progress on the megabill wasn’t just stalled out by Jeffries’ speech. Opposition by conservative hard-liners to changes made by the Senate led to one procedural vote being left open for more than nine hours Wednesday — the longest vote in House history, according to Democrats. GOP leaders pulled an all-nighter to flip lawmakers and eventually cleared the last procedural vote around 3:30 a.m., setting up Jeffries’ effort.

Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.

Speaker Mike Johnson predicted Thursday morning he had the votes to pass Republicans’ domestic policy megabill and would lose only “one or two” GOP lawmakers ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

“We’ll get this. We’ll land this plane before July 4,” he told reporters.

GOP leaders are barreling toward a final passage vote on the megabill as soon as this afternoon after pulling an all-nighter to advance the bill over the initial opposition of conservative holdouts upset at changes the Senate made to the package. Still, Johnson told reporters that while GOP lawmakers needed “time to digest” the Senate’s changes, many of their concerns were allayed with the help of President Donald Trump and his administration.

“The president helped answer questions. We had Cabinet secretaries involved, and experts in all the fields, and I think they got there,” he said.

He brushed aside concerns about Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), a purple-district lawmaker who was the sole lawmaker to oppose the procedural vote, saying he “tried to encourage him to get to a yes” though Johnson acknowledged Fitzpatrick has “got a number of things he’s just concerned about.”

The final vote has been delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ so-called magic minute, or the unlimited speaking time granted to party leaders that’s been stretched into its sixth hour. Jeffries could break the all-time record set by then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke for about eight and a half hours in 2021 to delay passage of Democrats’ domestic policy package.

Hard-line House conservatives said President Donald Trump assured them his administration would strictly enforce rules for wind or solar projects to qualify for the tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act — a pledge that persuaded them to back the party’s megabill.

“What he’s going to do is use his powers as chief executive to make sure that the companies that apply for solar credits, as an example, he’s going to make sure that they’re doing what they say when they say they’ve started construction,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said on CNBC on Thursday morning. “He’s going to make sure they’ve done that.”

The Senate passed its version of Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill earlier this week that included compromise language on the phaseout of incentives for solar and wind generation projects under the Democrats’ 2022 climate law.

The language gave projects one year to begin construction to claim the current tax credit, while projects that start later would need to be placed into service by 2027. That marked a shift from the language in the House version, H.R. 1 (119), supported by conservative hard-liners that only would provide 60 days for projects to begin construction.

Conservatives also opposed a “safe harbor” clause allowing projects to qualify for the credits if they begin construction by incurring 5 percent of the total cost of the work.

Norman, who voted to proceed to a final vote on the measure, said that Trump gave assurances that changes were going to be made, “particularly with getting permits,” although he did not provide further details. And while the president can’t remove the subsidies, Trump’s pledge on enforcement of the changes helped win support from conservatives.

“They wanted to put when construction began [as] when the time frame would extend from, like the wind and solar. We wanted date of service, which means they can’t take a backhoe out there and dig a ditch and say that’s construction,” he said. “So things like that the president is going to enforce.”

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) also said Thursday that Trump heard conservatives’ “concerns about the energy sector” and confirmed the administration would vigorously enforce construction dates for the phaseout of the credits.

“That was huge,” Burchett said.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is blasting Republican colleagues over Medicaid as he issues extended remarks ahead of the final GOP megabill vote.

Jeffries is utilizing his so-called magic minute to read off letters sent in by individuals in each state who rely on benefits that potentially hang in the balance as a result of the megabill’s provisions.

After reading a story from Arizona and criticizing Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz), Jeffries told the chamber: “I’m still in the A section right now, so strap in.”

He read another story from a constituent in GOP Rep. David Valadao’s district in California, which Jeffries said has the highest concentration of Medicaid recipients in the country. The writer’s son has Down syndrome and autism and lives at home with aging parents. He requires in-home care, which is provided through a Medicaid service that could be threatened.

Jeffries said his goal in reading out these stories is to “lift up the voices of everyday Americans all across the country.”

“This one big ugly Republican bill has put a target on their back,” Jeffries said. “This is a question for so many individuals of life and death. … It is so extraordinary that in the middle of the night, Americans face a bill that will target their health care.”

The minority leader is also hinting at the vulnerability of certain Republicans who are voting to advance the bill in potentially toss-up districts. Jeffries said one letter came from someone in a district “currently represented by Congressman Gabe Evans — currently represented.”

Speaker Mike Johnson predicted Jeffries would speak for an hour, but it’s unclear how long the speech will go on.

“I’m going to take my time,” Jeffries declared to applause from Democrats on the floor.

Speaker Mike Johnson is potentially just a couple of hours away from sending Donald Trump his “big, beautiful bill,” defying expectations that he could meet the president’s arbitrary but unwavering deadline.

After it appeared to be derailed late Wednesday by hard-right holdouts, Republicans advanced the bill around 3:30 a.m. and are set to vote on final passage around 6 a.m.

During the all-nighter, GOP leaders kept the procedural vote open for almost six hours as they worked to flip 12 votes. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) was the lone Republican to vote “no” at the end.

Things looked dire until around the 2 a.m. hour, when Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise returned to the House floor saying they had the votes. Not long after, the speaker was seen talking, laughing and what appeared to be praying with some of the House Freedom Caucus holdouts.

How did they get there? Holdouts say they’ve secured commitments from the White House on a variety of topics, especially on how the megabill is implemented. But House Republicans described the hours of talks as more of a venting session for the hard-liners.

“It was more just expression of concerns and priorities that are shared by the administration,” said one person granted anonymity to relay the conversations.

The holdouts said earlier Wednesday they were discussing future legislative opportunities, including a second reconciliation package, and the possibility of executive branch moves to address aspects of the bill they don’t think go far enough.

There was some tough love, too. Several MAGA-world figures including long-time Trump aide Jason Miller and Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita threatened the Republican holdouts on social media. Trump, who’d been privately helping Johnson press them all day, piled on pressure in a series of increasingly irritated missives. “RIDICULOUS!!!” he fired off at 12:45 a.m. as the bill was in limbo.

The mood among House Republicans is that they’re likely to pass the bill later this morning.

“I do so deeply desire to have just [a] normal Congress, but it doesn’t happen anymore,” Johnson said around 1:30 a.m. “I don’t want to make history, but we’re forced into these situations.”

What else we’re watching:

— New E&C subcommittee chair: Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) is in line to be announced today as the next chair of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, according three people granted anonymity to discuss the plan. “There’s a good possibility,” E&C Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) said Wednesday when asked if Griffith would get the post. “We’re announcing tomorrow though.”

— Race for DHS chair: Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) has entered the race to lead the House Homeland Security Committee. After Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) announced his retirement, Gimenez sent a letter to the GOP Steering Committee on Tuesday notifying his intent to run for the seat.

Meredith Lee Hill, David Lim, Bethany Irvine and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.

Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” is one vote away from President Donald Trump’s desk after clearing a key procedural hurdle that sets up a floor vote early Thursday morning.

Pulling an all-nighter two days after senators did the same, House Republicans were finally able to unite on the test vote around 3:30 a.m. Thursday — closing out a six-hour voting window that might have been extraordinary if the previous vote hadn’t been held open nine hours for similar reasons.

The discord inside the House GOP centered on Senate changes to the megabill, which first passed the House in May. Senators piled on more tax cuts and toughed some changes to safety-net programs, creating a two-front hassle for House whips that began early Wednesday morning and stretched overnight.

But the 219-213 vote on the “rule” — the procedural measure setting up final floor debate on the megabill — bodes well for Speaker Mike Johnson as he seeks to keep a promise to send the bill holding the lion’s share of the Republican legislative agenda to Trump’s desk by July 4.

“It’s been a good day — we’re in a good place right now,” Johnson said last Wednesday after the earlier, nine-hour procedural vote. “This is the legislative process. This is exactly how I think the framers intended for it to work.”

The breakthrough came after hours of meetings between GOP leadership and holdouts, exploring what executive actions or other promises could assuage hard-line fiscal hawks who were incensed about the Senate-passed bill’s budget deficits.

Action was nudged along by a Truth Social post from the president, just minutes after members of the House Freedom Caucus told reporters they didn’t want to vote Wednesday night.

“It looks like the House is ready to vote tonight. We had GREAT conversations all day, and the Republican House Majority is UNITED, for the Good of our Country, delivering the Biggest Tax Cuts in History and MASSIVE Growth. Let’s go Republicans, and everyone else – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on his social media platform.

Within minutes of Trump’s call for a vote, House leaders locked in the schedule and called the vote. The move was essentially a dare to the Freedom Caucus holdouts to vote against the legislation that is the cornerstone of Trump’s agenda. But many more hours of talks ensued.

Later Trump shared the exasperation many on Capitol Hill shared: “FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE. RIDICULOUS!!!”

In the end, only one Republican, moderate Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, joined Democrats in voting against the rule for floor consideration of the Senate-passed bill

Cassandra Dumay and David Lim contributed to this report. 

House Republican leaders said early Thursday morning they have made a breakthrough with the megabill holdouts and are preparing to advance the legislation in the coming hours.

Speaker Mike Johnson, heading onto the House floor around 2 a.m., said he had secured the votes to proceed and that final passage of the GOP’s domestic policy bill will follow later in the morning. A vote on the procedural measure setting up final consideration remains open after several hours of voting. “Hopefully in the next hour we get that done,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said of completing that vote.

Once the House approves the procedural measure, it will debate the bill before moving to a final vote, which could take multiple hours.

Earlier Thursday morning, Johnson said, “This is going to end well.”

“We’re going to meet our July 4 deadline, which everybody made fun of me for saying,” he added, holding a can of Celsius energy drink after a full-day blitz of discussions with the skeptical lawmakers that he said involved the help of the attorneys, Cabinet secretaries, and President Donald Trump himself.

The negotiations were not aimed at cutting a deal with the holdouts “because then you open Pandora’s box,” Johnson said. “We just deal with everybody in truth, and we find out where the red lines are, and we try to navigate around them and get a product that everybody can buy into.”

As a procedural vote to start floor debate on the GOP megabill stretched on Wednesday night, several MAGA world figures went online to threaten the Republican holdouts.

Hard-right lawmakers have objected that the bill increases deficits and does not sufficiently cut subsidies for clean energy and wanted more time to amend the bill. But top allies of President Donald Trump were having none of it.

Longtime Trump aide Jason Miller described the vote on whether to advance the procedural legislation as a simple choice between Trump and the Democrats. Trump’s top strategist on his 2024 campaign, Chris LaCivita, chimed in echoing the brusque message:
Top White House aide Stephen Miller demanded Republicans “stand with Trump” and show loyalty to the president who had been persecuted by “the communist left” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said anyone who is voting advancing the bill is voting against all of Trump’s tax pledges from the campaign, including one — “no tax on Social Security” — which is not technically in the bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson moved to push the GOP’s domestic policy megabill forward Wednesday night despite threats from House Republican vote a procedural measure down.

Johnson’s move — essentially daring the hard-liners to derail President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority — came after members of the House Freedom Caucus huddled among themselves following hours of negotiating Wednesday with GOP leaders. If enough Freedom Caucus members withhold their votes, the “rule” — the procedural measure providing for final floor consideration of the megabill — will fail.

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert indicated she’s sticking with her fellow Freedom Caucus members on any rule vote.

“Not tonight,” she said, before several of the hard-liners huddled again, this time in Johnson’s office.

Trump had a different view: “It looks like the House is ready to vote tonight,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “We had GREAT conversations all day, and the Republican House Majority is UNITED, for the Good of our Country, delivering the Biggest Tax Cuts in History and MASSIVE Growth. Let’s go Republicans, and everyone else – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Johnson indicated earlier Wednesday he planned to move forward with votes, and members were advised around 9:20 p.m. that he would stick to that plan and try to corner the holdouts, as some in his leadership circle have been counseling.