House Speaker Mike Johnson notched his first major policy win when he herded Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” last month.
By all appearances that began the process of the Senate deliberating its version of the legislation and dealing with holdouts in the upper chamber. All the better to get the signature legislation of Trump’s second term onto his desk and ready for that famous Sharpie signing.
Well, not so fast.
The legislation technically has not been sent over to the Senate yet. Today, the House passed a rule that also included a provision to make various corrections to the spending bill.
The fixes are fairly minute.
There is nothing on the changes to Medicaid, the size of the tax cuts or the phasing out of renewable energy tax credits or other concerns that some Republican Senators have raised.
It also does not remove the ban on states regulating artificial intelligence that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she opposed despite her vote for the bill. Rather, they are mostly technical fixes, striking out various paragraphs about formatting.
But that means the clock had not yet even started on the Senate’s formal consideration of and debate over OBBB as Wednesday dawned.
Later Wednesday, the corrected version passed ... again ... and finally handed over to the Senate.
The road to get here in the first place was circuitous at best. It ultimately took a day-long committee hearing, a last-minute deal cut behind closed doors and the deaths of older Democratic colleagues for Johnson to avoid a failure on the floor the first time around.
The bill includes numerous provisions that Trump and Republicans want, such as extending the 2017 tax cuts, enacting work requirements for food assistance and Medicaid, rolling back numerous renewable energy credits and ramping up spending for oil drilling, the military and immigration enforcement.
The Senate hopes to pass OBBB using budget reconciliation, which allows them to avoid a filibuster from Democrats as long as the bill relates to federal spending. Since “big beautiful” also includes a debt limit increase, Republicans are working on a limited time table as the United States is set to hit the debt ceiling next month.
Elsewhere, it removed the word “intelligence” for a provision to spend “$90,000,000 for the development of reusable hypersonic technology for military strikes and intelligence.” It also struck a whole section titled “Enhancement of Military Intelligence Programs.”
Furthermore, the legislation removes part of the reconciliation bill that retracts a Biden administration-era public land rule that withdrew National Forest System lands from mining.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats in the House and Senate are urging their Republican counterparts to, as Elon Musk famously implored, “Kill the Bill.”
“The bottom line is this, though: a congressmember’s core power is the power to vote,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in his morning remarks.
“That’s what the Constitution gave them,” Schumer said. “And House Republicans who say they don’t like the bill should exercise that power today. They have a unique opportunity to make the very changes they’ve been talking about for weeks.”
Schumer said that Democrats flagged the flaws in the language that caused the do-over.
Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, also sent a letter to his colleagues calling for them to kill the bill.
“Regardless of party, if you have sounded the alarm about this bill and vote yes on today’s rule, you’re complicit in what you claim to oppose,” he said.
Most of these are technical changes, but they illustrate just how delicate of a process Republicans have to navigate to pass Trump’s signature legislation.
And that does not even begin to paper over the legitimate policy disputes between the House and Senate conference or even within the conferences about federal spending levels.
