Texas Republicans vote to send GOP’s tax and spending megabill to Trump’s desk after threatening to tank it

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WASHINGTON — In a remarkable display of President Donald Trump’s power over lawmakers in his party, the U.S. House passed the GOP’s landmark tax and spending bill Thursday afternoon, sending the measure to Trump’s desk after quelling resistance from a handful of Texas Republicans.

The megabill’s rocky trip through Congress was marked by threats from hardline conservatives in the House, such as U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin, who signaled they might tank the bill for adding to the nation’s debt and failing to enact deeper cuts to clean energy tax credits. Meanwhile, moderate Republicans in purple districts were wary of cuts to safety net programs that their constituents rely on, leaving the bill with a narrow path through the lower chamber under the GOP’s slim 220-212 majority.

Trump won over the rabble-rousers by exerting his political will through a series of phone calls and Oval Office meetings. Each holdout ultimately cast aside their reservations and caved to the president’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.

All 25 Texas House Republicans, along with the state’s two GOP senators, voted for the bill, which unlocks billions in funding for Trump’s legislative priorities ranging from border security to tax cuts.

The uniform GOP support was critical with every Democrat in Congress — including all 12 members of Texas’ Democratic delegation — voting against the measure. Members of the minority party have slammed the bill’s various spending cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — also known as food stamps — that are being used to help pay for the tax breaks.

Among the most prominent of the Republican holdouts was Roy, a fourth-term Freedom Caucus stalwart who has routinely threatened to hold up his party’s agenda — and drawn the ire of GOP leadership — over demands for ideological purity.

For weeks ahead of Thursday’s vote, Roy railed against various provisions in the megabill, including what he considered to be too soft a rollback of clean energy subsidies stemming from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. As a fiscal hawk, Roy was looking for cuts anywhere he could find them.

He targeted the clean energy credits over concerns that they would promote industries he views as too unreliable, like wind and solar, and benefit Chinese manufacturers who are dominant in the clean energy market.

After passing an earlier version of the legislation through the House in May, the Senate softened some of the lower chamber’s hardline repeals, angering Roy.

The Austin Republican continued to insist he would vote against the bill if what he called the “green new scam” credits were not fully eliminated.

“I'm not going to vote to increase deficits,” he told reporters on a call in June.

Roy, along with fellow Texas Republican Reps. Michael Cloud of Victoria and Keith Self of McKinney, held up a procedural vote for hours late Wednesday night into Thursday morning as congressional leaders worked to shore up their support.

Despite the display of defiance, the trio backtracked on their opposition, helping advance the megabill to a final vote where they joined all but two members of their party in voting to send the measure to Trump. Their support came despite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s projection that the tax and spending package would add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit.

The holdouts declined to share what deals were made to bring them around on the bill, promising more details after the measure passed.

“We made some significant improvements today in conversations that we had both with our own leadership and the White House,” Roy told The Texas Tribune early Thursday morning after the procedural vote.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, oversees a thin Republican majority in the House, meaning he can only afford a few GOP defections on party-line legislation. This gives vacillating members outsized power to sink nearly any major piece of legislation if they form a small coalition of like-minded legislators to vote against a given bill.

Other Texas lawmakers’ dissent opened the door to doing just that.

Self, whose move to initially hold up the bill invited widespread backlash and primary threats, also expressed concern about the legislation’s spending levels and joined Roy in bemoaning the Senate’s less stringent rollback of green energy subsidies.

“The Senate broke the House framework, and then they stomped all over it. Now, House leadership wants to cram this broken bill down our throats by rushing it to the floor while in the middle of discussions, completely disregarding their promises,” Self said on social media of the bill, which he ultimately supported after securing unspecified concessions from party leadership.

U.S. Troy Nehls, a Richmond Republican and staunch Trump ally, pushed for steeper taxes on private university endowments, with larger funds being taxed at up to 21%. The Senate slashed the ceiling to 8%. Despite voicing “grave concerns” and proclaiming that he “cannot agree to this change,” Nehls caved and voted for the bill with the lower tax ceiling, saying that Republicans should stand behind Trump’s agenda given his November electoral victory.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, meanwhile, was irate after his provision banning the use of federal money for gender-transition procedures for minors was stripped by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that it ran afoul of Senate rules for budget-related bills.

To advance Trump’s bill with a 50-vote threshold — rather than the filibuster-proof 60 votes normally required to advance a bill out of the Senate — the legislation must have a direct budgetary impact.

Calling for the parliamentarian to be fired, the Houston Republican said the Senate should defy her ruling and insert the language back into the bill.

“Senators chose the easy path instead of fighting it,” Crenshaw said. “Disgraceful.”

He ultimately voted to send the bill to Trump’s desk, calling it “imperfect.”

Reps. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, and Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, also expressed more subdued concern Wednesday morning about how much the bill would add to the national debt. Both cast aside their reservations to vote for it.

Lawmakers on the other side of the aisle were united in their contempt for the legislation, which Trump labeled as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, called it “an abomination” that was “deeply un-American and just another Trump grift.”

“When you think about the number of Texans that are going to be impacted by this — well over 1 million — it is going to hurt,” said Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth.

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