House GOP passes Trump’s megabill after overnight procedural drama
The bill slashes safety net programs, repeals climate investments, and rewards GOP-led states—setting up a showdown in the Senate.
It took a early-dawn vote, weeks of intraparty warfare, a couple of rounds of eleventh-hour arm-twisting from President Donald Trump and plenty of intestinal fortitude, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) finally muscled the GOP’s tax, energy and immigration megabill through the House just before 7 a.m. this morning.
The sweeping package, a cornerstone of Republicans’ legislative agenda under Trump 2.0, survived open revolt from hardline conservatives pushing for deeper safety net cuts and blue-state moderates fighting for a more generous state and local tax deduction cap. And it faced unified resistance from House Democrats, who channeled grassroots outrage to battle the bill through messaging wars and procedural delays until the final vote was cast.
The final vote tally was 215-214-1. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) was the only Republican to reject the party line. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) voted present.
Before the vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called today the day that Republicans may have lost their majority.
“The GOP Tax Scam rips healthcare and food assistance away from millions of people in order to provide tax cuts to the wealthy, the well-off and the well-connected,” Jeffries said in a joint statement with House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) after the vote. “This fight is just beginning and House Democrats will continue to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the GOP Tax Scam is buried deep in the ground, never to rise again.”
Democrats fight the bill on substance and process
Democrats didn’t just oppose the bill’s substance, which slashes health insurance and nutrition assistance, unwinds major climate investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, and greenlights federal reimbursements to GOP-led states like Texas and Florida for past border operations.
They also bristled at the process, specifically, House Republicans’ decision to schedule committee markups for three of the most consequential sections of the bill during overnight sessions. Democrats say the late-night timing was no accident, but a deliberate attempt to ram through the bill’s most extreme provisions under the cover of darkness, with limited public scrutiny and little time for dissent.
“It’s telling that they’re ashamed of what’s in this bill. They know exactly what they’re doing—trying to pull one over on the American people by passing it in the middle of the night. They think we won’t show up, that we won’t fight back. But this debate is far too important,” Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.) told Once Upon a Hill between one of the overnight vote series. “The American people deserve to know not just what’s in the bill, which is disastrous for them, but also that Republicans know it too—and they’re doing it anyway.”
Johnson gambles big to deliver for Trump
Johnson entered the House chamber ahead of the vote with confidence in his whip count, even though it wasn’t clear the math was on his side.
“You never know till the final tally,” he told a group of reporters. “But I’m convinced we’re going to pass this bill tonight. May have one or two nos. You never can be certain.”
Perhaps his optimism stemmed from familiarity—he’d seen this movie twice before.
In February, he passed the initial version of the GOP megabill after a brief hardliner revolt fizzled, with every Not-Named-Massie rebel eventually folding. The same dynamic played out the following month, when the House approved the Senate’s compromise framework to unlock the filibuster-proof process known as budget reconciliation, again over the objections of his most fiscally rigid members. (For what it’s worth, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) joined Massie against the compromise budget.)
But the stakes were higher this time. Johnson had set a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline to deliver on former President Trump’s legislative agenda and raise the debt limit, without swallowing the significant policy concessions Democrats would have demanded in exchange for votes on a bipartisan stand-alone bill.
The speaker scored his first procedural win of the week on Sunday night when the GOP-controlled House Budget Committee advanced the full text of the megabill, complete with portions from 11 committees of jurisdiction. It followed a major setback two days earlier when four House conservatives stalled the bill in committee because the social safety net disinvestments didn’t go far enough or kick in fast enough.
The megabill wasn’t finished, but the clock was ticking
When the bill advanced out of the Budget panel, it was still incomplete. Key provisions—like the scope and timeline of new Medicaid work requirements and changes to the state and local tax deduction cap—were left unresolved as negotiations continued between House leadership and the two factions most at odds over the bill: Freedom Caucus hardliners demanding stricter eligibility rules for safety net programs, and blue-state Republicans pushing for SALT relief. Both sides wanted more than leadership was willing to offer—because the more they gave to one group, the more they alienated the other.
President Trump made a rare visit to the Capitol on Tuesday to address House Republicans directly, stepping into their weekly closed-door conference meeting with a clear message to the holdouts: the negotiating phase was over. According to members in the room, the tone was far from celebratory—Trump was there to deliver marching orders, not to negotiate.
The contours of agreements with both factions began to emerge late Tuesday. Leadership got on board with moving up the start date for Medicaid work requirements and repealing virtually all of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits. It also offered SALT Republicans a $40,000 deduction cap over the next four years, quadruple the current cap and $10,000 more than the number included in the megabill.
Democrats stage a marathon markup protest
But the final stretch of resistance came in the House Rules Committee, where Democrats mounted a marathon campaign to delay the bill’s path to the floor. The markup began at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning—an unusual move that drew sharp criticism from Democrats, who accused Republicans of hiding the bill’s most damaging provisions from public view.
Over the next 21 hours, Democrats offered 522 amendments and called 101 of their colleagues to testify, making it one of the longest and most combative Rules Committee hearings in recent memory. Republicans rejected every amendment on a party-line vote, including proposals to preserve Medicaid and SNAP funding, extend ACA premium subsidies, restore NIH cancer research dollars, protect access to Planned Parenthood, and expand the Child Tax Credit.
During the Rules markup, President Trump convened a high-stakes meeting at the White House with Speaker Johnson and members of the House Freedom Caucus, aiming to resolve internal GOP divisions threatening the passage of the megabill. Trump again urged unity, emphasizing the bill’s importance to his second-term agenda and cautioned that failure to pass the bill could be seen as a betrayal of the party’s commitments.
Upon his return to the Capitol, Johnson expressed optimism, stating that the meeting had been productive and that the House was moving closer to a consensus. However, some Freedom Caucus members remained skeptical, indicating that further concessions were necessary to secure their support.
The outcome of the meeting led to the introduction of a manager’s amendment later that day, incorporating changes such as accelerating the implementation of Medicaid work requirements and adjusting the SALT deduction cap to $40,000. These revisions aimed to bridge the gap between the party’s factions and facilitate the bill’s advancement to a full House vote.
CBO backlash, Senate showdown and what’s next
Beyond process complaints, Democrats were incensed by Republicans’ attempts to discredit nonpartisan analyses from the Congressional Budget Office—especially after GOP leaders circulated talking points casting doubt on CBO’s data, despite estimates showing steep Medicaid and SNAP cuts, growing deficits and disproportionate harm to low-income households.
According to CBO, the GOP megabill would slash federal Medicaid spending by $698 billion and SNAP by $267 billion over the next decade—reductions that would shrink household resources by up to 4 percent for those in the lowest income bracket by 2033. Meanwhile, households in the top income decile would see their resources increase by a similar margin due to tax cuts.
Even if Johnson can exhale, the bill now heads across the Capitol, where the Senate is expected to work its will. That sets up a lose-lose scenario for the speaker: his frontliners just took a politically risky vote on a bill that may never become law while his hardliners are likely to revolt once the Senate sends back a version stripped of the very concessions they forced into it.
And Democrats like Scholten don’t see this morning’s vote as the end of the fight.
“I think there’s a number of other opportunities where people can make their voices heard,” she said. “Democracy does not run without the American people participating—and now is the time for people to be making their voices heard, because it’s working. That’s why Republicans are doing this in the dead of night. Because they’re afraid of the people who are going to be holding them accountable.”
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