Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy told former White House adviser Steve Bannon on Thursday why he voted to pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” after previously voting against it.
Members voted 215-214-1, with Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio being the sole GOP lawmakers to vote “no” on the tax and spending package consisting of significant portions of Trump’s legislative agenda. Roy, on “Bannon’s War Room” said that through Wednesday White House discussions with Trump, they cemented crucial priorities in the bill, making him willing to vote for it.
“We worked to get this bill done over the course of the night with reservations. But the things that moved it forward that we thought were important: One, we firmly solidified killing all of the projects going forward under the Green New Scam,” Roy told Bannon. “Not existing projects — I’m still pissed off about that — but we’ll deal with that separately. But we firmly locked in that the … under-construction and future projects — we will be killing virtually all of those with a handful of grandfathering. We also have the Medicaid work requirements shoved up, which we had to personally negotiate in order to get that done.”
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“And yesterday we worked something out to help the non-expansion states under Obamacare be able to stay non-expanded so we can work this balance that I know you care about too, where we’re trying to manage the Medicaid scam problem that needs to be reformed, while also making sure working class Americans are still dealing with health care who have been kind of stuck because we’ve got such a broken health care system,” he continued. “So we’ve got 12 levers we’re pulling.”
However, Roy noted he was still dissatisfied with how the bill would affect the deficit.
“I do not like the final result in terms of the overall deficit numbers. Too much deficit in the first five years, too much savings in the second five years. We technically honored the deficit neutral over ten, but that’s bullcrap if all your savings are in the second five,” he told Bannon. “So my point to you, Steve, is I felt compelled to work with the president to achieve the objectives of the border funding necessary for the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE beds, the defense stuff that we’re working with Russ [Vought] on at the Office of Management and Budget to try to hold the hawks in town down and stop them from using all of the discretionary spending to mess things up.”
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“So the border and the defense money, plus what we got on the Inflation Reduction Act and the Medicaid work requirements, plus some of the other good spending cuts we already had in there on Medicaid eligibility,” Roy added before Bannon cut him off.
No House Democrats voted to pass the bill. House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris voted “present.”
Congressional Republicans are seeking to get the bill to Trump’s desk by July 4. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that GOP lawmakers must move rapidly to evade the possibility of the U.S. government defaulting on its debt, which could come as soon as mid-July.
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The bill includes a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit. Last-minute changes to the bill included the faster imposition of Medicaid work requirements to Dec. 31, 2026, moving up the phasing out of tax breaks for wind, solar and battery storage to 2028 and increasing the state and local tax deduction cap to $40,000 from $10,000 for households earning up to $500,000 annually, which mainly benefits people living in high-tax blue states.
Moreover, the bill extends the expiring provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and delivers on several campaign pledges, including eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay, while establishing a bigger tax break available to Americans age 65 or older. It will also dedicate over $100 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and increase defense spending by nearly $150 billion.
House Republicans also exceeded their target of cutting spending by $1.5 trillion over a ten-year period in the bill.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
