SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
House Republicans muscled through President Trump's massive tax and spending bill this week. The early morning vote came together in part because of a final personal push from Trump himself. The legislation still has a long road to go before it can become law, but the vote this week sends a clear message about where the Republican Party is today. So what does this all mean for Trump and the Republicans' agenda, and what does it tell us about how they're governing? We'll talk it through with NPR congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh. Hey, Deirdre.
DEIRDRE WALSH, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Remind us again, what is in this package?
WALSH: So this bill includes $3.8 trillion in tax cuts, 1.5 trillion in spending cuts and roughly 300 billion for defense and border security programs. In terms of the cut, the bulk of those come from changes to the Medicaid program. That's the health care program for low-income, elderly and disabled people. Adults without dependents need to meet new work requirements, and others will have to meet new eligibility roles. An early estimate from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that because of these changes, at least 3.6 million people could lose their health care coverage. The bill also includes cuts to food assistance programs and a $4 trillion increase to the country's borrowing authority. That's to avoid a default on the nation's debt later this summer.
DETROW: Deirdre, for months, we have been talking about the huge divisions in the House Republican Caucus, the fact that they have such a narrow majority. And that really endangered this bill, and yet it passed.
WALSH: Scott, it really came down to one factor, and that's President Donald Trump. As we've seen in previous high stakes votes in the House of Representatives, where there is a very narrow margin - three votes right now - the president is the closer. You know, I talked to one House chairman who told me he expected Speaker Johnson to get the bill 90% of the way, 90 yards down the field, but then he said Trump was going to have to barrel through the final 10 to get it over the finish line, and that's really how it played out.
We saw Trump come to the Hill on Tuesday. Even though there were these divisions between moderates and conservatives, he didn't really get into the details, but he made it clear they needed to get in line. When things started to blow up the next day, folks went to the White House, and they did get in the line. In the end, only two Republicans voted no. One voted present.
DETROW: Were there any major changes to the bill as all of this played out?
WALSH: No, I mean, really minor changes, but it really came down to a political calculation for House Republicans. They do not want to get sideways with Trump or the Republican base. They could risk a primary challenge, a mean tweet, threatening to take them out in their next campaign.
DETROW: Let's go from mean tweets to policy.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: The substance of this bill - what does it say about where the Republican Party is today?
WALSH: I mean, it is clear that it is Trump's party. He campaigned on renewing his 2017 tax cuts that will expire at the end of this year. Back then, in 2017, he was working with people like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was pushing really hard to have major changes, structural changes, to mandatory spending programs like Medicaid, Medicare.
Trump took those kinds of things off the table this time around. He really focused on sort of smaller items that he targeted to political constituency. He campaigned on removing taxes on tips and overtime to get at working-class voters in places like Las Vegas, and that really helped his party get a lot of new supporters this time around. Those items are in the bill, no tax and overtime, but they expire at the end of Trump's term. The rest of the spending cuts are permanent.
And I will just say, as a whole, the Republican Party over years has been focused on reducing the deficit. Not so much in the House Republican package - we do talk a lot about these spending cuts, but in the grand scheme, this bill adds trillions to the debt.
DETROW: Trillions - so this heads to the Senate. What do we expect there?
WALSH: There are going to be changes, and it's possible, at the end of the day, the sort of one thing that brings the Republican Party together - extending these tax cuts - could be sort of the one thing that ends up sort of being the easier thing to get done along with money for the border. Medicaid cuts could be a problem for some Senate Republicans, and there are other conservatives in the Senate who just dismiss the House Bill as really not serious on slashing spending. Senate Majority Leader John Thune talked this week about this whole fact that the U.S. credit rating was downgraded due to ballooning deficits.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN THUNE: A lot of our colleagues have made it very clear that in order for a bill to get through the House and the Senate and on the president's desk, it has to make a meaningful dent in the out-of-control spending we've seen over the past several years.
WALSH: But again, Scott, I think it's going to end up coming down to President Trump, again, bridging these divides.
DETROW: This is certainly going to be one of the biggest things, if not the biggest thing, that Congress does this term. That means it's going to be a big issue in the midterm. It's curious how the Democrats are responding to all of this.
WALSH: I mean, even before the House vote happened, we saw protests in districts across the country, targeting swing House Republicans focused on the impact of Medicaid cuts. There are a lot of districts where Republicans say their constituents rely on Medicaid. One House Republican, Dan Newhouse from Washington State, told me that 40% of his constituents are currently enrolled in Medicaid. And it's pretty clear Democrats are making this the central 2026 issue. Here's just some of what House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said right before the vote.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HAKEEM JEFFRIES: This day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representative.
WALSH: Democrats are really hoping that this is a rerun of the 2018 midterms. Back in 2017, Republicans focused on repealing and replacing Obamacare. There was a lot of backlash. They hope that happens again.
DETROW: That is NPR's Deirdre Walsh. Thank you so much.
WALSH: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
