Almost immediately after Election Day 2024, as Republicans celebrated the fact that they would soon control the White House and both chambers of Congress, GOP officials began preliminary discussions about how they could try to transform the country.
Not surprisingly, congressional Republicans settled on a strategy based on the budget reconciliation process — a legislative mechanism that would allow GOP senators to circumvent Democrats and pass a bill through majority rule, without the possibility of a filibuster. Once that plan was in place, the party got to work in earnest on what Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to as the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill.”
Over the course of roughly six months, the agenda has unfolded at a glacial pace. Ideas were floated and shot down. Measures were included and excluded. There have been threats, promises, deals, working groups, Mar-a-Lago trips, Fox News appearances, tweets and a seemingly endless number of public and private meetings, all intended to work toward a massive legislative package encompassing much of the president’s domestic policy agenda.
Normal people would be forgiven for saying, “Wake me when there’s a bill worth caring about.”
I can now report that the alarm bell is going off, and after half a year of deliberations and incremental steps, the Republicans’ megabill has reached the it’s-time-to-start-paying-close-attention-to-this stage. The Associated Press reported:
Republicans in Congress are moving with rapid speed to advance President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks, spending cuts and beefed-up border security funding as leaders work to enact many of his campaign promises. House committees have been laboring for months to draft the legislation, which Republicans have labeled “THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,’’ a nod to Trump himself. Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing to approve the package and send it to the Senate by Memorial Day.
It’s unrealistic to think the entire package can be summarized in a blog post, but in broad strokes, the public should recognize the GOP’s legislation as a potentially transformative bill, filled with trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts, provisions that would increase food vulnerability for struggling families, funding for mass deportations and an ineffective border wall, a wholesale abandonment of efforts to combat the climate crisis, and perhaps most notably, massive cuts to Medicaid — a celebrated health care program that Trump vowed not to cut — that would strip millions of Americans of their health care coverage, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii told The Wall Street Journal, in reference to the GOP proposal: “It’s like this was designed in a lab to piss off the maximum number of people.”
I’m going to start writing a lot more about the legislation in the coming days and weeks, but at this point, it’s worth pausing to take stock of where things stand.
The Republican plan has only started taking shape in recent days, and pieces of the bill have started working their way through key GOP-led House committees. It will soon fall on the House Budget Committee to pull the pieces together and craft one giant legislative package that combines the elements approved by the other committees.
If the House speaker has his way, this will happen very soon: Johnson wants a reconciliation bill done, on the floor, and passed before members leave for their Memorial Day break — which means a vote by late next week.
If that happens — and given that GOP leaders can lose the support of only three of their own members, success is hardly assured — the package would then move on to the Senate, where Republican members have already said they have significant changes in mind.
Trump apparently expects a final product, approved by both chambers, on his desk by July 4. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
