Republican Holdouts

The back and forth: First, the “Big Beautiful Bill” was passed by the House. Then it was wrangled over in the Senate, passing narrowly, 51–50. Now, House legislators are returning to Washington to vote on the version that passed the Senate, and some of the representatives who say they were bullied into passing President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda are now saying they’re going to resist voting to pass. The Fourth of July deadline that the president gave Congress remains, Elon Musk keeps having a conniption, and your national deficit very well might balloon if the Republican holdouts acquiesce. Happy America Day, everyone! Wouldn’t Jefferson be proud?

“House Speaker Mike Johnson can afford to lose only three Republican votes in the face of unified Democratic opposition, if all members are present and voting,” reports Bloomberg. “Republicans Warren Davidson and Thomas Massie, who voted against the bill in May, remain firm no votes.” So that leaves space for just one more who can object; any more and the whole bill will fail. Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas) might defect. Or possibly Rep. Andy Ogles (R–Tenn.). Or Rep. Ralph Norman (R–S.C.).

“I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product,” said the speaker. “We understand this is the process. It goes back and forth, and we’ll be working to get all of our members to yes.”

Specifically, there’s a lot of frustration with what happened to SALT deductions and Medicaid.

“The Senate bill increases the SALT cap to $40,000 annually for a five-year period, when it would then snap back to the current $10,000 limit,” reports Bloomberg. “The House bill was more generous amid pushback from Republicans from New York, California and New Jersey. Most of the so-called SALT caucus ultimately supported the Senate deal as the best they could get. But New York’s [Rep.] Nick LaLota has said the deal isn’t enough and that he would vote no on the bill.” Other Republicans in the House, representing high-tax states, might feel the same.

Republicans’ vision has been that Medicaid cuts could offset the spending and tax cuts included in the Big, Beautiful Bill. But the Senate version “makes $930 billion in cuts over a decade to Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act,” according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and has slightly stricter welfare work requirements than the House version of the bill, which made roughly $800 billion in cuts.

But more broadly, there should be a lot of frustration with massive government spending. Elon Musk continues to sound the alarm about this, and so does Reason‘s very own Eric Boehm (citing conscientious objector Rand Paul):

“Most budget projections in Washington operate on a 10-year window, which is useful for long-term policymaking—not all fiscal consequences of a new law are apparent in the first year after it is passed,” writes Boehm. “Unfortunately, as [Sen. Rand] Paul [(R–Ky.)] points out, the 10-year budget window also creates opportunities for lawmakers to load up bills like this one with gimmicks designed to hide the true cost.”

Over 10 years, the Senate version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act will reduce the deficit by $521 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis released Sunday. Those budget savings are the result of about $1.3 trillion in spending reductions—almost all of which would occur in the last five years of that 10-year window.

Whether those spending cuts actually happen will depend on future lawmakers sticking to the plan. But the existence of that plan can be used to offset tax cuts approved by lawmakers today.

But “the largest gimmick by far is the decision to have the CBO score the legislation based on the faulty assumption that the 2017 tax cuts would not expire this year,” continues Boehm. “That so-called ‘current policy’ baseline hides the $3.9 trillion budgetary hit that would otherwise have to be offset to make the bill revenue-neutral. It is roughly the equivalent of saying that your rent payment will be the same next month, so therefore does not cost anything—and then using that logic as a justification to spend your entire monthly budget on other purchases.”

Scenes from New York: “To the socialist mind, families are not forces for good; they’re competitors to the state.” Me, on why Zohran Mamdani and other socialists like him don’t understand what families actually want and need.

• President Trump says that Israel has agreed to a 60-day ceasefire with Hamas, though no details have been made public and the Israeli government has not yet confirmed.
• Lia Thomas, the male-to-female transgender swimmer, will be stripped of all swimming titles won from the University of Pennsylvania following the Trump administration exerting pressure on the school. A probe by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found Penn guilty of violating Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities” and will force the school to issue apologies to all female swimmers forced to compete against Thomas. I think this is fair, albeit long overdue.
• A family living close to an ill-managed landfill in southern California “filed a report with the local regulator, the South Coast Air Quality Management District. At that point, in mid-2023, their complaint was one of 900 or so. By the time Howse got her [breast cancer] diagnosis in March 2024, that number had topped 9,500. Since then, the regulator has slapped Chiquita Canyon LLC, a subsidiary of Waste Connections Inc., with hundreds of air-quality and health-code violations and ordered it to fix the place up.” (“In early 2022 a closed section in the landfill’s northwest corner began overheating, eventually reaching temperatures above 200F (93C),” reports Bloomberg. “That’s nearly 40% hotter than the federal EPA’s standard for landfill operations. As the waste slowly cooked, it belched out toxic gases, elevating nearby levels of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and benzene, which can damage DNA and cause leukemia after enough exposure. Large amounts of leachate (basically, trash juice) built up and bubbled, boiled and even shot into the air like geysers.”)
• A very good and warranted psychoanalysis:

Despite the fact that they were not born or raised in America, Zohran Mamdani’s mother was welcomed as a student at Harvard and his father is a professor at Columbia, two of the most elite American institutions. His father originally came to the U.S. as a sponsored college… pic.twitter.com/LrNLkdzggJ

— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) June 30, 2025

• You seriously cannot make this up:

This is hilarious. 25% of the signers of the “Economists for Zohran” letter are not even economists.

And Oren Cass hasn’t signed yet, so there’s still time to increase the percentage. https://t.co/lkckNmJPnk

— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) July 2, 2025

• Tyler Cowen’s rules for travel, which I think could be summarized as “go to Eastern Europe for really good food.” (I disagree with the gamble-on-a-destination-you’re-not-interested-in advice; I did this with Cabo Verde, the African island nation, and had a bad time.) Debate as you wish!

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