Berliner Tageblatt - Giant Trump tax bill faces make-or-break vote in Congress

The party's senators passed the sprawling package by a tie-breaking vote Tuesday after a bruising 27 hours of infighting over provisions set to balloon the national debt while launching a historic assault on the social safety net.

It was originally approved by the House of Representatives in May but must return for a rubber stamp of the final wording in the lower chamber -- and success is far from guaranteed.

"This bill is President Trump's agenda, and we are making it law," House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement, projecting confidence that Republicans were "ready to finish the job."

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 piles an extra $3.3 trillion over a decade onto the country's fast-growing deficits, while forcing through the largest cuts to the Medicaid health insurance program since its 1960s launch.

Fiscal hawks, meanwhile, are chafing over spending cuts that they say fall short of what they were promised by hundreds of billions of dollars.

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

"It's hard for me to conceive that it will pass as is. There's some amazingly bad stuff in here," Arizona conservative Andy Biggs told his local radio station, KTAR News.

- 'Abomination' -

Lawmakers are expected to return from recess Wednesday morning to vote immediately, although they have a cushion two days before Trump's self-imposed July 4 deadline.

The 887-page text only passed in the Senate after a flurry of tweaks that pulled the House-passed text 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 almost $1 trillion in health care cuts.

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

Meanwhile changes to federal nutrition assistance are set to strip millions of the poorest Americans of their access to food stamps.

Johnson will be banking on Trump leaning on waverers, as he has in the past to turn around contentious House votes that were headed for failure.

The president indeed applied further pressure Tuesday in a post on his Truth Social platform, calling on House Republicans to "GET IT DONE."

Approval by Congress will mark a huge win for Trump, who has been slammed for governing by executive edict in other areas of his domestic agenda as a way of sidestepping scrutiny.

He has spent weeks cajoling wayward Republicans in both chambers who are torn between angering welfare recipients at home and incurring Trump's wrath.

House Democrats have signaled that they plan to campaign on the bill to flip the chamber in the 2026 midterms, 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.

"And shame on House Republicans for continuing to bend the knee to Donald Trump's extreme agenda."

K.Brown--BTB