Dem
47
GOP
53
In the run-up to the vote on the BBB, many Republican senators and representatives were hopping up and down and saying if it passed in its proposed form the sky would fall and they would never, ever vote for it as that would be a betrayal of everything they stood for. Guess what: Almost none of them stood for anything and, with three exceptions in the Senate and two in the House, all of them voted for it. And of the five apostates, only two—Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie (both R-KY)—really meant it. The others voted against the bill with an eye on the 2026 elections. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was initially against the bill on account of his reelection campaign, and at the last minute decided not to run and could then freely vote against it. He gets partial credit here. Many of the other Republicans simply caved to Donald Trump's carrots and/or sticks.
How about a few examples? At 6:50 p.m. last Wednesday, hardliner Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) tweeted that the Senate bill was "morally and fiscally bankrupt." 9½ hours later, at 3:20 a.m. Thursday morning, he voted to advance the morally repulsive bill to a floor vote, and later in the day, he voted to pass it. Maybe the Moral and Fiscal Fairy sprinkled magic dust on the bill in that 24-hour interval, so he changed his "mind."
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a leading and always-loud member of the Freedom Caucus, slammed the Senate bill as a "travesty" that undermined all the "good things" in the House bill. Did he vote "no" in order to force a conference committee to fix the problems? Of course not. He didn't want to give up his seat on the R.F.S. Trump.
Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) represents a poor R+1 district where fully two-thirds of his constituents are on Medicaid. Last week, he tweeted that he could not support a bill that guts Medicaid. Did he vote for the bill in the end? Yup. Not only did he let his constituents down, but he probably also threw away his seat since all his 2026 Democratic opponent will talk about, day and night, is Valadao's vote to take away health care from the people of CA-22 and elsewhere.
Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) has always been very upset about the deficit. The bill will increase the deficit by at least $3 trillion over 10 years, maybe more. So what did deficit hawk Smucker do? He said: "Everyone became convinced it just didn't make sense to send it back to the Senate." How come? It could have gone to a conference committee where House members could have fought to reduce the effect on the deficit. Nope. He just rolled over and played dead.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) railed against the arbitrary July 4th deadline because he had no time to read the bill he was required to vote on. So he voted for it without knowing what was in it. After all, no one in Knoxville read it either, so what difference does it make? There are plenty of others who told the same story.
Are we surprised? Not at all. It is always the same story. What annoys us, though, are media publications that take these guys at their word every time they threaten to vote "no" on something. Why don't we see more stories like: "Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who talks a great story but in the end always chickens out, today threw a temper tantrum and said he wouldn't vote for bill X unless [whatever]. We fully expect him to chicken out again. He always does."
This said, the question of why they chickened out is still a useful one to examine. The obvious answer, and the one we've already written about extensively, is that Donald Trump cracked the whip. Another thing that annoys us is that the current iteration of the Republican Party has few, or no, consistent policy principles. That makes it tough for people like us, who try to make sense of what's going on in the world of politics. But whether we like it or not, the defining principle of the GOP in 2025 is loyalty to Trump. Beyond that, the Party's "principles" are whatever Trump says they are today (and, of course, they may change tomorrow). Unless you are a unicorn like Paul or Massie, you are dead in the water as a Republican if you defy Trump, because you have effectively rejected the Party (a party which bandies about the "RINO" label very freely). Maybe this won't be true in 2026, or 2028, or 2030, but the members were not voting in those years, they were voting in 2025.
It is true that Elon Musk has threatened to primary any Republican who voted for the bill, but that is a semi-compelling threat, at most. Musk is rich, yes, but he's also a windbag with the attention span of a fruit fly. He may well forget all about this by 2026. And even if he doesn't forget, he's also shown no particular ability to translate his money into votes. There's also the small problem that there are roughly 230 Republicans up next year, and Musk can't exactly devote significant attention to 230 different races. On the other hand, Trump most certainly will get involved, and most certainly will try to destroy anyone who crosses him. The upshot is that if a member is comparing the threat posed by defying Trump versus the threat posed by Musk, there's no contest.
However, the di**-waving is not the only dynamic in play here. It is true that congressional Republicans rammed the bill through, so as to meet Trump's July 4 deadline. But that wasn't the only time-related consideration. The debt ceiling (which has now been increased by $5 trillion) was going to be reached in August, or maybe September at the outside. So, if the BBB process had failed, Congress would still have been left to deal with a budget-related crisis as soon as it returned from the July 4 recess. And that budget-related crisis would have carried much more significant consequences in the event of failure (i.e., a default on the national debt), and would have been nearly as difficult to navigate as the BBB talks were.
Similarly, it was not especially plausible to wait until the FY 2025-26 budget. The math behind the BBB relied on the (dubious) notion that the 2017 tax cuts are now a part of the federal budget, and so extending them does not create additional debt beyond the 10-year window. This is what made it possible to make them "permanent" (which doesn't really mean "permanent," it really means "enshrined into law without a set expiration date"). The problem here is that the 2017 tax cuts were set to expire this year (that was a necessity the last time, so as to survive the Byrd Bath during Trump v1.0). So, if the Republicans did not get a budget passed for this fiscal year (i.e., before October 1), not only would magic accounting have no longer been available, but the 2017 cuts might well have been permanently dead. Undoubtedly, the risk was high enough that many Freedom Caucusers (many of whom, remember, used to be anti-tax tea partiers) didn't want to chance it.
The upshot is that the July 4 deadline was arbitrary, but only somewhat so. Congressional Republicans could maybe have taken a few more weeks, but then they would have started to run up against the debt-ceiling deadline and then the fiscal-year deadline, and they'd be doing so while dealing with an angry Donald Trump. So, it's not too surprising that the members took Trump's deadline more seriously than would seem to be warranted.
There is also one other dimension worth noting here. Everything was rolled into one bill for three main reasons: (1) to limit the process to one giant catfight, instead of two or three or four; (2) because of the intent to use reconciliation, which can only be done once per fiscal year for spending bills and (3) because Trump has very little interest in sausage-making or legislating, preferring instead to rule via executive order and other techniques that do not involve Congress.
What this all means is that this is it. This is almost certainly going to be Trump's only major legislative initiative; he doesn't want to put in the work to maneuver additional bills through Congress this year and, besides, anything he wants is not going to get past the Senate filibuster. Next year, it will be too close to the midterms for skittish Republican members, and thereafter, there is an excellent chance the GOP will no longer have the trifecta. Note that the last BBB in 2017 was also Trump's only major legislative initiative.
Obviously, this meant that defying Trump was not just breaking ranks on one bill, it was breaking ranks on THE bill. But there's also another implication. Because this bill was an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink proposition, and because every vote counted, it was also an excellent opportunity for Republicans to advance their pet projects or causes. For example, companies with "intangible drilling and development costs" are now exempted from the corporate alternative minimum tax. This will apply almost exclusively to petroleum companies (because if anyone needs a handout, it's surely petroleum producers), and was inserted in order to secure the vote of Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).
Since we don't want to overdo it on the BBB today, we're going to wait until tomorrow to run down some of the pork and pork-adjacent stuff that has already turned up. For now, the point is that the members were looking at some pretty serious downsides if they voted "no." Meanwhile, they had an excellent opportunity to create their own, personal upsides. It's not so surprising that all but a handful of Republicans made the choices they made.
We'll finish, for now, with one last observation. Obviously, the Senate filibuster makes it nigh-on impossible to pass certain kinds of legislation (basically, anything that is not fiscal, and therefore can't be done via reconciliation). The trade-off, beyond the fact that the majority party is not able to implement big chunks of its program, is that the things that can be accomplished via reconciliation tend to be done haphazardly and rapidly, with little or no scrutiny, because the majority party gets one moonshot every three or four years. It just gets harder and harder every year to argue that the filibuster should NOT go the way of the dodo. (V & Z)