The Senate passed President Donald Trump's “big beautiful” tax bill on Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
The bill was first passed by the House of Representatives on May 22, with a 215-214 vote after party leaders made some last-minute changes to the bill that satisfied House members holding it up. The bill includes many of Trump’s legislative campaign promises, including tax cuts for hospitality and overtime workers, increased funding for immigration crackdown efforts, and cuts to certain social programs. Elon Musk–a key donor to Trump’s 2024 election campaign–and Trump had a public falling out on X over the bill in June.
Today the bill is back to the House for a final vote. Ahead of the vote, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries broke the record for longest House speech.
Voices on the left were opposed to the bill, citing the bill as universally unwanted and underdeveloped. Voices on the right were conflicted on the bill, noting the tension the bill created but emphasizing the importance of passing it.
The Washington Post Opinion (Lean Left bias) publishedan article arguing, “When you put all of this together, you end up with legislation that most everyone hates and also knows will almost certainly pass. You can’t have a strong democracy with a president and major party who don’t respect election results or independent institutions such as universities and the media. But while Trump and other Republican politicians are the most obvious problems with American democracy today, they aren’t the only problems.”
A writer for the National Review Opinion (Right) wrote, “It was clear from the House elections of 2024 that if Republicans wanted to get a big tax bill through Congress in 2025, they were going to have to play ball with blue-state House members and raise the deduction for state and local taxes from $10,000. But as the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ emerges from the Senate, Republicans are on the brink of quadrupling it to $40,000, then increasing it even further… The Big Beautiful Bill is now, more or less, ‘too big to fail.’ A huge chunk of President Trump’s domestic agenda is tied up in it… As its proponents accurately warn, not passing anything would mean the individual tax cuts enacted in 2017 expire, hitting Americans with a massive tax increase.”
An article in Slate (Left) read, “American people did not ask for this. Not in 2024. Not in 2016. What passed on July 1 was not the expression of majority will. It was a collision of institutional power, donor influence, and a governing party that has become highly efficient at using structural advantage to advance policies the public never demanded and often explicitly rejects.”
A writer from The Dispatch (Lean Right) said, “Repealing Obamacare was the party’s white whale, something they’d pursued for seven years before the opportunity at last arrived to harpoon it. Hardly anyone in the House or Senate GOP seems comparably passionate about the Big Beautiful Bill. If anything, support that was already tepid is turning chilly as the process wears on.”
