Aaron Schwartz/Sipa via AP Photo
DC: House Begins Debate on GOP's 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) speaks to the media in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, July 2, 2025.
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I said from the beginning that if the conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus had any respect for consistency of their message and believed any of their stated principles, there is no way they could vote for the Big Beautiful Bill. Most of those Freedom Caucus members have spent their entire career in Congress warning about deficit spending. They are now staring down the most expensive piece of legislation in American history, which will add trillions of dollars of red ink and interest payments to the ballooning national debt. On their terms, it’s a bill that betrays everything they have spent a lifetime fighting for.
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And on top of that, everything that they were handed as a nod to those stated beliefs during negotiations over the House version of the bill was degraded or stripped away by the Senate. So basic self-respect dictated that they could not possibly go through with capitulating to the likes of Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on the final bill.
And yet, going into voting on Wednesday, I did not believe that would be the case. I still don’t totally believe it. Because none of these Freedom Caucus members have taken that step to move to no.
Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC), two stalwarts of the House Freedom Caucus, voted against the Senate concurrence of the Big Beautiful Bill in the Rules Committee on Tuesday night. But that was a free vote, a way to express displeasure without tanking the bill. If they did the same on the House floor, they would likely have Freedom Caucus backup from a dozen members, and it’s very likely that the bill couldn’t pass.
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The votes on Wednesday started off fine, but suddenly, a vote sequence that included the rule for debate stalled for hours. There were eight holdouts, and the voting was just stuck. Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus put out almost a ransom note about the Senate version of the bill’s “failures.”
Many complaints are familiar. First off, the Senate version violates the so-called fiscal framework, which was hard-wired into the budget resolution. They call it $1 of tax cuts for $1 of spending cuts; in reality they are putting their thumb on the scale by claiming that increased economic growth offsets $2.5 trillion in tax cuts over a decade. But even with that generosity, the Senate bill would have an excess $761 billion in tax cuts that aren’t offset by spending cuts, and adding interest on the debt, that number balloons to $1.3 trillion. If you include the expectation that temporary tax cuts will eventually be made permanent (like the five-year raise in the state and local tax deduction cap, and the four-year Trump tax promises like no tax on tips or overtime pay), along with other provisions the Freedom Caucus things are being undercounted, you have trillions more in red ink. The caucus considers that unacceptable.
The renewable energy tax credits that the Freedom Caucus wanted to rapidly eliminate were given a year of new life by the Senate, and the Senate also weakened “foreign entity of concern” restrictions that would have kept subsidies away from projects using the tiniest amount of Chinese components. These measures were the main win for Freedom Caucus Republicans in the House version of the bill, and they feel the Senate erased them.
The Freedom Caucus’s desire to target waste, fraud, and abuse were upended by one of the most ridiculous provisions in the history of the Congress. This part of the Trump bill would force states to help pay for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), thus pushing them to cut enrollment. The idea was that states with higher error rates would pay more into the program, creating the talking point that it was a measure to cut fraud in SNAP. But Murkowski got a delay on the cost-sharing, specifically for states that have the highest error rates, literally incentivizing waste, fraud, and abuse to avoid those payments. This was done for the benefit of Alaska (which has the highest payment error rates) to grab Murkowski’s vote, and the Freedom Caucus decries the “pork to buy Senate votes” in their bill.
Other complaints have to do with things the Senate parliamentarian threw out of the bill because they didn’t comply with the particular requirements of budget reconciliation. That includes several efforts to deny benefits to undocumented immigrants in operatic ways, like requiring parents seeking benefits for their citizen children to have Social Security numbers, for example. The restriction from using Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program for gender-affirming care was also a casualty of the parliamentarian, as was a change in registration for gun silencers, and a requirement to grandfather in current repayment plans for student loan borrowers. I don’t know what the Freedom Caucus expects here when the provisions were ruled out of order, short of firing the parliamentarian, which the Senate leadership rejected.
Still other parts are just whiny. While the caucus didn’t like the handout to wealthy blue state residents with the state and local tax deduction, they all voted for it in the House. The Senate cut it by reducing the length to five years, and the Freedom Caucus still doesn’t like that, rightly suggesting that it would be extended. The caucus liked the deeper Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill but wanted to reduce the 90 percent Medicaid expansion federal share—again, something that was not in the House bill but something they just hoped the Senate would do—so they’re big mad about that.
Finally, the Freedom Caucus lists a bunch of small ticky-tack Senate changes that they don’t like, which reveals just how dug in they are. This includes the Senate cutting a tax on remittances from 3.5 percent to 1 percent, eliminating most of the House’s expansion on Health Savings Accounts, limiting the defunding of Planned Parenthood to one year, killing a tax break for foreign-owned tobacco companies, adding a radiation health coverage bill that was intended to secure the vote of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), cutting the endowment tax from 21 percent to 8 percent, inserting a tax on imported Puerto Rican rum, and a bunch more.
More fundamentally, the Freedom Caucus only exists because it operates as a bloc that demands its ideas be reflected in legislation. If they get rolled this easily, they might as well disband.
But importantly, this is not a list of demands; it’s just a list of failures. The House Republican leadership outsourced the task of whipping Freedom Caucus votes to the White House. And after the meeting, you heard more about “needing assurances” and less about not voting for the bill at all.
In order to truly believe that the Freedom Caucus is going to tank the bill, they’re going to have to actually vote against it. Not hold out, not fold their arms and grumble. Actually vote against it. And we still haven’t seen that.
As a result, while the timeline of this bill may slip, there’s just no actual evidence that the bill itself may slip. Not yet.
There’s another breed of Republican that’s even less likely than the Freedom Caucus to do that, even as they see the bill as detrimental to their political survival. Forcing 17 million people out of their health insurance coverage is not viable for the few Republicans in districts Trump lost. They know they are kissing their time in Congress goodbye if they agree to this legislation. Rep. David Valadao (R-CA), whose district has one of the largest concentrations of Medicaid recipients in the country, who voted to impeach Trump during his first term, and whose district Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won, has said he cannot possibly vote for this bill. And Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC), a doctor, has been poking holes in the Medicaid cuts and their apocalyptic real-world impact.
But again, as of late Wednesday afternoon, nobody in the House Republican caucus had actually voted no. Holdouts are not the same as opposers. Outside of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who’s already done it, I don’t see a lot of conviction to defy Donald Trump from House Republicans, mad though they may be.
As Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) said on the House floor, kicking off Wednesday’s debate, “I say to my Republican colleagues, what’s wrong with you people?... Jesus Christ, what are you people thinking?” The answer is they are not.
The Republican Party’s shift into a cult of personality means that appeals to reason, to consistency, even to electoral reality, means less than what the Dear Leader says must be done. This is the entire Trump agenda, and the pressure on House Republicans to cast aside their brains and go along with it is immense.
