WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders are moving forward with trying to pass President Donald Trump’s ambitious policy package, with a final vote as soon as the wee hours of Thursday.
Republicans released their final amendments to the massive tax cut proposal on Wednesday night, just ahead of the House Rules Committee wrapping up a nearly 22-hour hearing to hash out the final contours of the bill. Dozens of Democrats appeared before the committee to present hundreds of amendments of their own, dragging out the hearing’s process by hours. The GOP-led panel rejected all of their amendments.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the chair of the committee, said after the hearing that she expected the House to vote late Wednesday on the rule for the GOP’s tax package and that “there is a chance we’ll do the bill tonight.”
House Republican leaders later alerted lawmakers to their schedule for the coming hours: begin debate on the bill around 2:15 a.m. Thursday, vote on final passage between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m., and plan to walk off the floor by 6 a.m.
Democrats were already thwarting the plan by 11:15 p.m. Wednesday, though. As soon as Republicans tried to begin House debate on the rule, Democrats forced a vote on adjourning the chamber, an effort to drag out the clock.
There isn’t a final version of the bill, which is titled, “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The rules committee still has to roll the GOP’s 11th-hour amendments into the previous 1,100-page legislation that’s been circulated. It’s also not clear what all of the GOP’s last-minute changes are, or if the final proposal even has the votes to pass.
Part of the strategy by Republican leaders is to use the vote itself to pressure holdouts into caving and supporting the bill. The GOP can only afford to lose a handful of votes, and so far, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has said he’ll vote no, and some others, like Rep. Dave Schweikert (R-Ariz.), said as recently as Wednesday evening they weren’t on board with it.
The legislation is consequential: It includes roughly $4 trillion in tax cuts for wealthy people and offsets some of those cuts by slashing federal health and nutrition programs by more than $1 trillion.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press
Some of the GOP’s last-minute additions to the bill started getting attention late Wednesday. During the rules committee hearing, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) howled about a “magical amendment” now being tied to the bill that would make it easier for people to buy gun silencers. Specifically, this provision eliminates a $200 firearm registration fee for silencers and also removes a requirement that people have to register their silencers at all.
The addition was a demand from Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus who had been waffling on whether to back the bill.
Scanlon called it “a brazen attempt to make it easier to commit violent crime.”
House Republicans’ final package also will no longer include mandates to sell potentially hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands. Some other public land provisions, like advancing a mining road in Alaska, were also stripped from the bill.
This appears to be a win for Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who opposed these mandates. The Sierra Club celebrated this change to the bill, which it said is otherwise awful.
“The American people have spoken loud and clear – our public lands should not be for sale,” Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said in a statement. “Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle were right to throw this proposal in the trash can, but a bad bill is still a bad bill.”
The Center for Western Priorities specifically thanked Zinke for helping to get this provision out of the final bill.
“Clearly, selling off public lands is still a third rail for members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” said the group’s deputy director, Aaron Weiss. “I’m grateful to our champions on both sides of the aisle, especially Representative Ryan Zinke, who fought against this misguided attack on our public lands.”