House stumbles on Trump’s 'Big Beautiful Bill'

WASHINGTON (CN) — It may be back to the drawing board, for now, for House Republicans, who are on track to fail a key vote needed to advance President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” to a final ballot in the lower chamber.

It was shaping up to be a disappointing end to a long day in the House Wednesday, which saw GOP leadership and the White House working for hours to win support from a handful of conservatives and spending hawks who were less than satisfied with the version of Trump’s budget reconciliation megabill, passed by the Senate on Tuesday afternoon.

The bill’s stumbling block came in the form of a procedural measure known as a rule — a required hurdle which legislation must clear before it can be debated and considered for final passage.

A handful of House Republicans refused to back the proposed rule, including Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Indiana Representative Victoria Spartz, Texas Representative Keith Self and Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde. Texas Representative Chip Roy, who has already criticized the measure for what he sees as paltry spending cuts, did not vote.

As of midnight on Wednesday, the vote remains open on the House floor as Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans aim to flip some of the holdouts. Johnson has said that he is willing to keep the vote open as long as it takes to secure the required support, although it’s unclear how long that could be.

Even if the rule fails, it’s far from game over for the Big, Beautiful Bill. House leadership is likely to try again Thursday if the rule goes down. But it will be a tight squeeze for Congress, which is angling to send the budget reconciliation package to the president’s desk in time for Independence Day.

As it became clear that the House was set to falter before it reached a final vote on the budget package, top Republicans insisted that they were far from defeated.

“Sometimes it gets a little messy,” Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “Sometimes it takes a little more time than we would like, but I think we’re going to get there, because President Trump knows we need to get there.”

Trump and the White House pushed hard on House Republicans ahead of Wednesday night’s vote to get the legislation across the finish line. Writing in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, the president contended that Congress’ GOP majority was “united.”

And in a separate post, he appeared to pit his party against Democrats over the budget reconciliation package — though it was the GOP majority, not the minority party, which ended up tanking Wednesday’s rule vote.

“Go Republicans, beat the crooked Democrats tonight!” Trump wrote. “Pro-growth tax cuts never fail.”

Vice President JD Vance set an urgent tone in his own statement, posted to X.

“The Big Beautiful Bill gives the president the resources and the power to undo the Biden border invasion,” Vance said. “It must pass.”

If made law, the proposed spending megabill would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and hike the federal debt ceiling. The measure would also authorize additional funding for defense and border security measures — all while cutting certain funding for Medicaid and government nutrition assistance programs.

There was much heartburn among House Republicans over the Senate version of the budget reconciliation package, narrowly passed in the upper chamber on Tuesday. Conservatives and spending hawks in the House were furious with projections that the proposed measure could balloon the deficit by as much as $1 trillion more than the lower chamber’s own draft of the budget megabill passed earlier this year.

Other Republican lawmakers expressed concern about proposed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program laid out in the reconciliation package.

Several GOP holdouts spent the day filtering in and out of the White House, meeting with Trump as he tried to negotiate their support for the measure. And Republican whip efforts on Capitol Hill held up the House’s evening proceedings for more than six hours as leadership attempted to reach a consensus.

This is a developing story and will be updated …

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