‘Nothing Good Happens After Midnight’: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Sputters as House GOP Scrambles

“Nothing good happens after midnight,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania recalled his late mother warning him. It’s a lesson that seemed to come true in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as a 1 a.m. hearing on President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and immigration bill spiraled into disarray.

What was supposed to be a late-night procedural step toward delivering much of Trump’s domestic agenda—dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—instead exposed deep and widening fractures within the House Republican conference. By Wednesday afternoon, lawmakers were still debating its provisions—with no sign that it would pass.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and some key GOP holdouts are set to meet with Trump at 3 p.m. to work through the impasse, according to a White House official. 

Hardline conservatives said Wednesday that the legislation still does not cut spending enough even as Republican leadership has agreed to deeper budget reductions to Medicaid and federal benefits programs. They are also concerned about concessions given to blue-state Republicans to increase the limit on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, now set at $10,000.

The legislation, which would extend the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year while introducing new policies like tax exemptions for tips and overtime wages, has become a high-stakes test of Trump’s hold over the Republican Party.

Trump and congressional leaders have set July 4 as the deadline for final approval of the legislation, which Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, one of the key holdouts, on Wednesday morning called an “arbitrary deadline.”

“If today comes and goes,” he said, “it doesn’t mean that prospect is off the table—it just means it might not happen today. There’s some kind of belief in Washington, D.C. that once today comes and goes that this cannot be fixed. This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions.”

“We’re going to work with the President today, we’re going to work with our colleagues to deliver, but there’s a long way to go,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy, another key holdout, said on Wednesday morning. “We’ve got to deliver on what we’re talking about but we’re not going to be able to get the bill done.”

Trump has tried to put pressure on skeptical Republicans. He made a rare visit to the Capitol on Tuesday to call on Republicans to drop their demands—and in some cases their principles—to pass a bill that would slash taxes by nearly $4 trillion while dramatically reshaping federal programs and increasing defense and border security spending by hundreds of billions more.

He warned dissenters they could be “knocked out” in primaries and labeled Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a longtime critic, “a grandstander” who “should be voted out of office.”

Still, even Trump’s hardball tactics appear to have done little to resolve an increasingly intractable set of disputes within the Republican conference.

—With reporting from Brian Bennett