The House Rules Committee is meeting Tuesday afternoon to hash out the final version of President Donald Trump‘s “big, beautiful bill,” which focuses on tax cuts among other GOP priorities, as Republican lawmakers face mounting pressure to pass the legislation by a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
The committee’s meeting comes shortly after the Senate approved the bill, more formally known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, early Tuesday afternoon in a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Susan Collins (R-ME) were the three Republican defectors.
Tillis objected to the bill over its Medicaid reforms, and Paul has voiced his opposition to the bill because it “explodes” the debt. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the Senate version of the legislation will increase the deficit by some $3.3 trillion over the next decade.
Now, the legislation goes back to the lower chamber, where House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other GOP leaders are corralling votes. The House narrowly passed the bill last month in a 215-214 vote, and now that several modifications have been made to the text, more than two dozen House members are currently holdouts.
House GOP leadership could face a few problems as they look to gather the votes needed to get the bill through final passage, including Fiscal hawks who aren’t pleased that many of the cuts passed in the House bill were axed by the Senate parliamentarian.
The latest development for the “big, beautiful bill” comes after a jam-packed weekend in Congress before the Senate’s final passage. After hours of negotiations, Senate Republicans voted 51-49 late Saturday night to advance the GOP megabill. As part of Democrats’ opposition, Schumer then forced Senate clerks to read aloud the 940-page bill on the chamber floor, a procedural tactic that took nearly 16 hours from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon.
The vote-a-rama also made history: The previous record for the most roll-call votes during a vote-a-rama was 44 from 2008, but Democrats, with the help of some Republicans, appeared to break that record on Tuesday. Around 7:30 a.m., senators took their 45th roll-call vote, when counting a pair of procedural votes that started the session on Monday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed Democrats would bring “amendment after amendment after amendment to the floor” as they look to stall the bill. Republicans have also offered some amendments of their own, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) stripping her own provision over artificial intelligence regulation after a deal over the amendment fell through.
