The House of Representatives has just passed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill.
The spending bill includes no taxes on tips, social security, and overtime. It also includes measures on immigration, energy expansion, and defense spending.
Next, the bill will head to a vote in the Senate.
Check it out:
After the bill’s passage, House Speaker Mike Johnson called it a victory, but acknowledged that there is still a lot of work ahead of them.
Here’s what he had to tell reporters:
The final vote was 217-215, with every single House Democrat opposing the bill.
Notably, the only Republican to vote ‘no’ on the spending bill was Rep. Thomas Massie.
His reasoning?
Despite the bill boasting $2 trillion in cuts, Rep. Massie said that the spending bill doesn’t cut enough, adding $328 billion to the deficit this year alone.
Here’s what Rep. Massie had to say about his decision to vote against the bill:
AP reported:
With a push from President Donald Trump, House Republicans sent a GOP budget blueprint to passage Tuesday, a step toward delivering his “big, beautiful bill” with $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts despite a wall of opposition from Democrats and discomfort among Republicans.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had almost no votes to spare in his bare-bones GOP majority and fought on all fronts — against Democrats, uneasy rank-and-file Republicans and skeptical GOP senators — to advance the party’s signature legislative package. Trump made calls to wayward GOP lawmakers and invited Republicans to the White House.
The vote was 217-215, with a single Republican and all Democrats opposed, and the outcome was in jeopardy until the gavel.
“On a vote like this, you’re always going to have people you’re talking to all the way through the close of the vote,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise said before the roll call.
“We got it done,” the speaker said afterward.
Passage of the package is crucial to kickstarting the process. Trump wants the Republicans who control Congress to approve a massive bill that would extend tax breaks, which he secured during his first term but are expiring later this year, while also cutting spending across federal programs and services.
Next steps are long and cumbersome before anything can become law — weeks of committee hearings to draft the details and send the House version to the Senate, where Republicans passed their own scaled-back version. And more big votes are ahead, including an unrelated deal to prevent a government shutdown when federal funding expires March 14. Those talks are also underway.
It’s all unfolding amid emerging backlash to what’s happening elsewhere as billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk is tearing through federal agencies with his Department of Government Efficiency firing thousands of workers nationwide, and angry voters are starting to confront lawmakers at town hall meetings back home.
Democrats during an afternoon debate decried the package as a “betrayal” to Americans, a “blueprint for American decline” and simply a “Republican rip-off.”
“Our very way of life as a country is under assault,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the steps of the Capitol.
Flanked by Americans who said they would be hurt by cuts to Medicaid and other social programs, the Democrats booed the GOP budget blueprint. But as the minority party, they don’t have the votes to stop it.
Fox News added:
The House of Representatives has adopted a resolution that will eventually become a massive multi-trillion-dollar bill full of President Donald Trump’s priorities on the border, defense, energy and taxes.
In a major victory for House GOP leaders, the resolution passed in a 217 to 215 vote.
All Democrats voted against the measure, along with lone Republican rebel Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who was concerned about its effect on the national deficit.
The next step is now for the relevant House committees to meet and build their own proposals, which will eventually be returned into the framework and negotiated into a compromise deal with the Senate.
It was a dramatic scene in the House chamber on Monday night as Republican leaders delayed formally ending a vote for roughly 45 minutes as they worked to convince conservative fiscal hawks to support the legislation.
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