Perhaps President Donald Trump said it best at the signing ceremony for the One Big, Beautiful Bill: “The largest spending cut, $1.7 trillion, and yet, you won’t even notice it.”
The president signed the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act into law at the White House on July 4. Par for the course, Congress nearly ran out the clock on their deadline. But, unlike other deadlines Congress faces (the debt limit, government funding, etc.), the July 4 deadline for the Big, Beautiful Bill was arbitrary and self-imposed. Nevertheless, in the final days of the bill’s negotiations, Congressional leadership exhibited a fervent resolve to stick to the July 4 deadline, which Trump firmly latched onto not only because he wanted the policy wins but also because of the optics. Trump’s understanding of good optics was on full display at the signing celebration—complete with a flyover of B-2 bombers.
Trump’s signature sealed what was probably the most hectic few days on Capitol Hill that I’ve covered in my career.
After the Senate advanced the bill on June 28, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ordered a full reading of the bill—nearly 1,000 pages long—on the Senate floor, followed by a 24-hour vote-a-rama. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Senate GOP leaders were wrangling the potential holdouts: Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In the early morning hours of July 1, it became clear that the final passage was riding on Murkowski’s support. The Alaska senator made GOP leadership and the press well aware she was no fan of the legislation, but she did not let the opportunity go to waste. The final version of the bill had a number of handouts and carve outs for the Last Frontier. My personal favorite: a measure that provides a larger tax deduction for business meals for certain Alaskan fishing and processing ventures. Murkowski’s vote made it a 50–50 tie in the Senate. Vice President J.D. Vance broke the tie, which sent the legislation back to the House.
The House wanted to move quickly. To the dismay of both House GOP conservatives and moderates, they were getting shoved the Senate version despite about four months of House negotiations before the legislation even made it to the upper chamber. Moderates were angry because the Senate made more Medicaid changes, increasing the government’s savings on the program from $800 million to about $1 trillion over the 10-year budget window. House conservatives, namely the House Freedom Caucus and allies, were upset that the Senate version of the bill did not adhere to the ratio of tax cuts to spending cuts agreed to in the budget resolution by the House.
House leadership wanted to move so quickly that potential GOP holdouts complained they wouldn’t even have enough time to read the final version of the Senate bill before voting. On a special episode of my Daily Signal show, the Signal Sitdown, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina told me the House was being forced to “take it up something that is 980 pages, and nobody’s even read [it].”
“We shouldn’t be trying to pass something we know nothing about,” Norman added.
Concerns like Norman’s forced House leadership to slow down the process and discuss the Senate changes—well, that, and a mistake in the rule produced by the House Rules Committee that governed debate on the bill. It was 48 hours of non-stop whipping, and Trump was Johnson’s ace in the hole. On July 2, the president hosted a group of potential moderate holdouts at the White House in the morning and a group of House conservatives later in the afternoon.
The moderates turned out to be easier to win over than the conservatives.
Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, chair of the GOP Main Street Caucus, emerged from the White House meeting and said, “Donald Trump is the best closer in the business, and we’re going to get it done.”
“The president, I think, closed out just about everybody,” the South Dakota Congressman added.
House conservatives were willing to push harder. “The sense is the White House needs to deliver the Freedom Caucus — that’s the project of the day,” an unnamed source from House leadership told POLITICO. “The White House, the thinking goes, is better situated to discuss executive orders and potential future legislation that could address their concerns.”
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee has a penchant for telling it how it is. He told reporters that conservatives had “reached a critical mass” of holdouts and that “it’s going to be a jailbreak,” either against or in favor of the bill.
In my conversations with conservative House members since the July 2 meeting, the White House meeting was not about feel-good face time with the president. The president’s team and House conservatives went through a long list of conservative concerns, and the White House addressed how each of these concerns would be addressed by the executive branch in the coming months. That did not stop the House Freedom Caucus from publishing a three-page memo tearing the Senate version apart for failing to go further on spending cuts and sunsetting Biden-era environmental subsidies. Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the House Freedom Caucus chair, did not attend the White House meeting.
What plans were exactly cooked up in that White House meeting remains unknown. Members have remained tight-lipped on the issue. It’s speculation, but the rescissions package currently in the Senate’s hands and future rescissions packages seem to be the White House’s way to address conservatives’ desire to further cut government spending.
Enter OMB Director Russ Vought. Vought’s conservative bona fides made him one of Trump’s most effective messengers for working over conservatives behind the scenes. He spent much of July 2 on the Hill assuring conservatives that the executive branch would use its authority to further curb government spending. In the dead of night on July 2, the House had the votes. One “magic minute” and vote later, and the bill was on the way to the president’s desk.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
Did things have to transpire the way they did? Probably not. The July 4 deadline was completely self-imposed. The real deadline was the X date for the debt limit, which was inching backwards toward the fall. And House members have just about had enough of swallowing Senate products full of handouts for Murkowski or Collins. Such is the nature of narrow majorities.
Nevertheless, the wins are real: Over $150 billion for border security and deportations and a massive tax hike averted. The alternative looks something like what transpired in Trump’s first term when Republicans, led by anti-Trump leaders in both chambers, got a tax cut but failed to deliver on Trump’s other campaign promises: Obamacare repeal and the border wall. This time, things were different.
The budget reconciliation process was always going to be a hot mess, but a mess worth having. I believe the kids have a term for that these days: “brat.”
