BRANDON, Miss. and WASHINGTON, D.C.— The hot sun beat down on the pavement in the parking lot of U.S. House Rep. Michael Guest’s office in Brandon, Mississippi, as about 20 protesters gathered on Thursday to encourage the congressman to vote against President Trump’s tax cuts and spending cuts.
Soon after, though, Guest, who represents Mississippi’s Third Congressional District, joined other Republicans to pass House Resolution 1. Estimates show it will add trillions to the national debt while cutting services that help the poor and slashing taxes, largely to the benefit of wealthier Americans. The bill also gives a massive funding boost to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, with $170 billion for detaining and deporting immigrants.
Protesters showed up at Guest’s office hoping to speak to one of his staff members in person to express their concerns about H.R. 1, attendee Camille Wright told reporters. But when they arrived, the office was locked and had a note on the door that told visitors to call a phone number to speak with a member of Guest’s staff.
Determined to tell their congressman that he should vote against the bill, a couple of protesters called the number and gave detailed messages for the staff members to relay to Guest.
Kathleen Obeirne, who has helped organize 50501 protests in Jackson, said she came to Guest’s office because she was concerned about the harm H.R. 1 could cause Mississippians and Americans. She said residents could lose their health insurance due to the legislation’s Medicaid and Medicare cuts—and that it could force some Mississippi hospitals to shut their doors due to a loss in funding.
“We want to make sure that the congressman understands—maybe he doesn’t even understand this,” she told reporters on July 3. “Maybe he doesn’t understand the effect of these Medicare cuts on Mississippi’s health-care system, and so we want to make sure he understands. And we want to make sure his constituents understand so they can speak up for themselves and their fellow Mississippians.”
Guest voted in favor of H.R. 1 on Thursday afternoon shortly after protesters had left the parking lot of his office. So did Mississippi’s other Republican U.S. House representatives, Trent Kelly and Mike Ezell.
In the U.S. Senate, Republican U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi backed the legislation as well.
Mississippi’s only Democrat in Congress, U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, joined those warning that H.R. 1 could force hospitals in his district to close.
“It’s a bill that takes food out of children’s mouths, strips health care from our seniors, and makes college unaffordable for working families, so the wealthy can get another tax break. In Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, this means shuttered hospitals, empty grocery carts, rising bills, and dreams deferred,” the congressman said Thursday in a statement to the Mississippi Free Press.
Trump: ‘A Great Bill for the Country’
House Republicans propelled President Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax breaks and spending cuts bill to final passage in Congress after overcoming multiple setbacks to approve his signature second-term policy package before a Fourth of July deadline.
The tight roll call, 218-214, came at a potentially high political cost, with two Republicans joining all Democrats opposed.
GOP leaders worked overnight and the president himself leaned on a handful of skeptics to drop their opposition. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York delayed voting for more than eight hours by seizing control of the floor with a record-breaking speech against the bill.
“This is going to be a great bill for the country,” Trump said afterward, as he departed for an event in Iowa. He said he would sign the bill into law Friday.
The outcome delivers a milestone for the president and for his party. It was a long-shot effort to compile a lengthy list of GOP priorities into what they called his “one big beautiful bill,” at nearly 900 pages. With Democrats unified in opposition, the bill will become a defining measure of Trump’s return to the White House, aided by Republican control of Congress.
“You get tired of winning yet?” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., invoking Trump as he called the vote.
“With one big beautiful bill we are going to make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before,” he said.
Republicans celebrated with a rendition of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” a song the president often plays at his rallies, during a ceremony afterward.
Tax Breaks and Safety Net Cuts
At its core, the package’s priority is $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. This includes allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year.
There’s also a hefty investment, some $350 billion, in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.
To help offset the lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to Medicaid and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a major rollback of green energy tax credits.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.
“This was a generational opportunity to deliver the most comprehensive and consequential set of conservative reforms in modern history, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the House Budget Committee chairman.
Democrats United Against The Big ‘Ugly Bill’
Democrats unified against the bill as a tax giveaway to the rich paid for on the backs of the working class and most vulnerable in society, what they called “trickle down cruelty.”
Jeffries began the speech at 4:53 a.m. EDT and finished at 1:37 p.m. EDT, 8 hours, 44 minutes later, a record, as he argued against what he called Trump’s “big ugly bill.”
“We’re better than this,” said Jeffries, who used a leader’s prerogative for unlimited debate, and read letter after letter from Americans writing about their reliance of the health care programs.
“I never thought that I’d be on the House floor saying that this is a crime scene,” Jeffries said. “It’s a crime scene, going after the health, and the safety, and the well-being of the American people.”
And as Democrats, he said, “We want no part of it.”
Tensions ran high. As fellow Democrats chanted Jeffries’ name, a top Republican, Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, called his speech “a bunch of hogwash.”
Hauling the package through the Congress has been difficult from the start. Republicans have struggled mightily with the bill nearly every step of the way, quarreling in the House and Senate, and often succeeding only by the narrowest of margins: just one vote.
The Senate passed the package days earlier with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie vote. The slim majority in the House left Republicans little room for defections.
“It wasn’t beautiful enough for me to vote for it,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. Also voting no was Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who said he was concerned about cuts to Medicaid.
Once Johnson gaveled the tally, Republicans cheered “USA!” and flashed Trump-style thumbs-up to the cameras.
Political Costs of Saying No
Despite their discomfort with various aspects of the sprawling package, in some ways it became too big to fail — in part because Republicans found it difficult to buck Trump.
As Wednesday’s stalled floor action dragged overnight, Trump railed against the delays.
“What are the Republicans waiting for???” the president said in a midnight-hour post.
Johnson relied heavily on White House Cabinet secretaries, lawyers and others to satisfy skeptical GOP holdouts. Moderate Republicans worried about the severity of cuts while conservatives pressed for steeper reductions. Lawmakers said they were being told the administration could provide executive actions, projects or other provisions in their districts back home.
The alternative was clear. Republicans who staked out opposition to the bill, including Massie of Kentucky and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, were being warned by Trump’s well-funded political operation. Tillis soon after announced he would not seek reelection.
Rollback of Past Presidential Agendas
In many ways, the package is a repudiation of the agendas of the last two Democratic presidents, a chiseling away at the Medicaid expansion from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and a pullback of Joe Biden’s climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Democrats have described the bill in dire terms, warning that cuts to Medicaid, which some 80 million Americans rely on, would result in lives lost. Food stamps that help feed more than 40 million people would “rip food from the mouths of hungry children, hungry veterans and hungry seniors,” Jeffries said.
Republicans say the tax breaks will prevent a tax hike on households and grow the economy. They maintain they are trying to rightsize the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse.
The Tax Policy Center, which provides nonpartisan analysis of tax and budget policy, projected the bill would result next year in a $150 tax break for the lowest quintile of Americans, a $1,750 tax cut for the middle quintile and a $10,950 tax cut for the top quintile. That’s compared with what they would face if the 2017 tax cuts expired.
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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.