US House Rules Committee meets after the Senate passes U.S. President Trump’s sweeping spending and tax bill.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Washington: A divided Senate on Tuesday passed Republicans' marquee bill to slash taxes and social safety net programs, sending it to an uncertain fate in the House amid deep GOP divisions that still threatened to derail President Donald Trump's first-year domestic agenda.
The 51-50 vote reflected the considerable angst among Republicans over the legislation and underscored the rough road it still faced in the House, where several Republicans were vowing to block it in defiance of Trump's demand that it be enacted by July 4.
In the Senate, three Republicans -- Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky -- joined all Democrats in voting against it, forcing Vice President JD Vance to cast the tiebreaking vote.
The bill would extend roughly $3.8 trillion in tax cuts enacted during Trump's first term in 2017 and add new tax breaks on tips and overtime that he promised during the campaign, while providing hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding for border security and the military.
A House vote was expected as soon as Wednesday. But the bill faced pushback from politically endangered Republicans who say the Medicaid cuts the Senate advanced, which are deeper than what the House initially approved, go too far. And conservatives are furious at some of the measures the Senate added that increased the cost of the legislation and its impact on the national debt.
Shortly after the Senate passed the bill, Speaker Mike Johnson pledged that the House would quickly clear it for Trump. Yet it remained unclear whether Johnson would be able to muster the necessary support in the closely divided House, where he can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes.
A White House official said Trump would be calling skeptical House Republicans to cajole them into voting for the bill, and did not want to see them propose new changes that would require new negotiations with the Senate.
The measure would add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Sunday -- a cost that far exceeds the $2.4 trillion price of the version passed in the House. And it would result in $1.1 trillion in health care cuts, nearly $1 trillion of them to Medicaid, causing 11.8 million more Americans to become uninsured by 2034, the same office found.