The China Mail - US House sets make-or-break final vote on Trump tax bill

Trump is seeking a green light in the House of Representatives for his Senate-passed "One Big Beautiful Bill" -- but faces opposition on all sides of his fractious party over provisions set to balloon the national debt while launching a historic assault on the social safety net.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson spent much of Wednesday struggling to corral his rank-and-file members as the package scraped through a series of "test" votes that laid bare deep divisions in the party.

It was set for a final vote to advance it from Congress to Trump's desk around 8:30 am (1230 GMT) after passing its last procedural hurdle in the early hours.

"We feel very good about where we are and we're moving forward," an upbeat Johnson told reporters at the Capitol.

"So we're going to deliver the Big, Beautiful Bill -- the president's 'America First' agenda -- and we're going to do right by the American people."

Originally approved by the House in May, Trump's sprawling legislation squeezed through the Senate on Tuesday by a solitary vote but had to return to the lower chamber for a rubber stamp of the senators' revisions.

The package honors many of Trump's campaign promises, boosting military spending, funding a mass migrant deportation drive and committing $4.5 trillion to extend his first-term tax relief.

But it is expected to pile an extra $3.4 trillion over a decade onto the country's fast-growing deficits, while shrinking the federal food stamps program and forcing through the largest cuts to the Medicaid health insurance scheme for low-income Americans since its 1960s launch.

While moderates in the House are anxious that the cuts will damage their prospects of reelection, fiscal hawks are chafing over savings that they say fall far short of what was promised.

Johnson has to negotiate incredibly tight margins, and can likely only lose three lawmakers in the final vote, among more than two dozen who have declared themselves open to rejecting Trump's bill.

- 'Abomination' -

Republican leaders had been hoping to spend just a few hours on Wednesday afternoon approving the package, although they had some breathing room ahead of Trump's self-imposed Independence Day deadline on Friday.

The 887-page text only passed in the Senate after a flurry of tweaks that pulled the House-passed version further to the right.

Republicans lost one conservative who was angry about adding to the country's $37 trillion debt burden and two moderates worried about plans for around $1 trillion in health care cuts.

Some estimates put the total number of recipients set to lose their health insurance under the bill at 17 million, while scores of rural hospitals are expected to close.

Legislation in the House has to go through multiple preliminary votes before it can come up for final approval, and a majority of lawmakers must wave it through at each of these stages.

But there were warning signs early on as the package stumbled at one of its first procedural steps, with a vote that ought to have been straightforward remaining open for seven hours and 31 minutes -- making it the longest in House history.

Johnson had been clear that he was banking on Trump leaning on waverers, as the president has in the past to turn around contentious House votes that were headed for failure.

The Republican leader has spent weeks hitting the phones and hosting White House meetings to cajole lawmakers torn between angering welfare recipients at home and incurring his wrath.

"FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE. RIDICULOUS!!!" Trump thundered in one of multiple posts to his Truth Social platform that sounded increasingly frustrated as Wednesday's marathon voting session spilled into Thursday.

The minority House Democrats have signaled that they plan to campaign on the bill to flip the chamber in the 2026 midterm elections, pointing to analyses showing that it represents a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest.

"Shame on Senate Republicans for passing this disgusting abomination," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.

M.Zhou--ThChM