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      House Republicans block Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ in major setback

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      Rightwing lawmakers derailed Donald Trump’s signature legislation in the House of Representatives on Friday, preventing its passage through a key committee and throwing into question whether Republicans can coalesce around the massive bill.The party has spent weeks negotiating a measure dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill” that would extend tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, fund mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and temporarily make good on his campaign promise to end the taxation of tips and overtime. To offset its costs, Republicans have proposed cuts to the federal safety net, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.At a House budget committee hearing on Friday intended to advance the measure one step closer to a floor vote, four Republican members of the far-right Freedom Caucus joined with the Democratic minority to block it from proceeding, arguing the legislation does not make deep enough cuts to federal spending and to programs they dislike.“This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does, with respect to deficits,” said Chip Roy, a Texas representative who opposed the bill alongside fellow Freedom Caucus members Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Pennsylvania’s Lloyd Smucker initially voted to advance the bill, then changed his vote to no at the last minute, which he said was a procedural maneuver to allow the bill to be reconsidered in the future.The setback raises the stakes for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who had set a goal of Memorial Day to get the legislation passed through the House and on to the Senate. Trump has said he would like to have the bill on his desk by the 4 July Independence Day holiday, and earlier on Friday attempted to pressure conservative holdouts.“Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’” the president wrote on Truth Social. “We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”Later on Friday, the budget committee announced it would reconvene on Sunday night to consider the bill, giving Johnson another couple of days to find agreement with the hardliners.Republicans are crafting the bill using the budget reconciliation procedure, which Senate Democrats cannot block with the filibuster. But the GOP is split over what to include and what to cut in the expensive legislation, which Congress’s non-partisan joint committee on taxation estimates will cost $3.7tn through 2034.Rightwing lawmakers want to see big reductions in government spending, which has climbed in recent years as Trump and Joe Biden responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and pursued their own economic policies.“We’re … committed to ensuring the final package is fiscally responsible, rightsizing government and putting our fiscal future back on track. Unfortunately, the current version falls short of these goals and fails to deliver the transformative change that Americans were promised,” Clyde said at the budget committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe called for deeper cuts to Medicaid, but many Republicans in the House and Senate have signaled nervousness with dramatic funding reductions to the program that provides healthcare to lower-income and disabled Americans. Others in the GOP dislike parts of the bill that would cut green tax credits created by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.And a small group of Republicans representing districts in blue states such as New York and New Jersey are demanding an increase in the deduction for state and local taxes, saying it will provide needed relief to their constituents. But including that would drive the cost of the bill even higher, risking the ire of fiscal conservatives.Johnson has little choice but to listen to all of these groups. The GOP can afford to lose no more than three votes in the chamber, a historically small margin that has made passing legislation a tightrope walk. More

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      Republican push to cut green tax credits would raise utility bills, new data shows

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      As House Republicans propose taking a sledgehammer to the green tax credits in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, new data shows the loss of those incentives could lower some Americans’ household income by more than $1,000 a year due to increased utility bills and job losses.Though Donald Trump has called climate spending a “waste” of money, the data – published by the industry group Clean Energy Buyers Association (Ceba) on Thursday – provides evidence that rescinding them would actually increase expenses for ordinary Americans in red and blue districts alike.The rollback would increase the price of electricity and gas, the report found. And it would lead to job losses and “economic slowdown”, it says.“Americans voted to combat the cost-of-living crisis in the 2024 election,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Ceba. “Now is the time for Congress to incentivize private investment in more sources of low-cost, reliable energy that fuels economic growth and jobs, helps the United States secure energy dominance and independence, and decreases energy costs nationwide.”The new figures, crunched for Ceba by the National Economic Research Associates consulting firm, focus specifically on credits 48E and 45Y, for clean energy investment and production respectively. In a reconciliation package draft this week, the House ways and means committee proposed phasing out these incentives after 2031, and placing many new restrictions on them in the meantime.If the rollbacks proceed as proposed, the new study found, at least 19 states would see the cost of energy increase for both consumers and industry between 2026 to 2032. (More states would probably see similar impacts, but the authors did not examine all 50 “because of the turnaround time for research”, Ceba said).New Jersey is the state expected to see the biggest economic losses if the clean energy investment and production credits are repealed, the authors found. There, the authors found the rollback could increase household gas and utility bills by 2.9% and 13.3% respectively. The repeal would also trigger the loss of 22,180 jobs, they found.All told, households across the state would see a stunning $1,040 average loss in annual household income and a $3.24bn decrease in state GDP, the authors wrote.“As commercial and industrial activity declines, demand for labor and capital falls, leading to wage losses, declining household income, and shrinking investment,” the research says.The authors’ outlook for state-level electricity markets assumes an incremental growth in electricity demand due to the growth of data centers. Some of Ceba’s members are tech giants – including Amazon, Google and Meta – who are bringing more data centers online.An earlier Ceba report, published in February, forecast the effect on electricity prices alone across all 50 states. If the clean energy investment and production credits are repealed, the average American household would see their annual household utility bills increase by $110 by 2026, it found.Wyoming would see the largest rise of 29.5% on average for households across the state, the earlier report found. More

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      New bill aims to allow research to catch up with US’s increasing cannabis consumption

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      A recently introduced bill, if it passes, would allow research on cannabis despite its schedule I status, which some experts say could help policymakers “craft effective” legislation in the future and potentially allow more clinical research on medical cannabis.Representatives Dina Titus and Ilhan Omar introduced the Evidence-Based Drug Policy Act of 2025 (EBDPA) last week, which would radically ease research restrictions on cannabis and other schedule I substances.Omar said in a statement that the law would allow research to catch up with the US’s increasing cannabis consumption: “We need drug policy to follow the science and reflect the reality on the ground in states across the country.”Schedule I substances, including cannabis, heroin and MDMA, are legally defined as having “no accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse”. Medical cannabis proponents point out that cannabis’s federal schedule I status is contradictory, given that patients throughout the US already use cannabis for medical purposes.The Biden administration pushed for cannabis to be reclassified as a schedule III substance, which would alter its legal status and make cannabis-based medicines eligible for FDA approval.But the rescheduling process has continued to stall since Donald Trump reentered the oval office.Unlike rescheduling, the EBDPA would be simple to enact. In its current form, it repeals sections of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act of 1998 that forbid federal funds from going towards research of schedule I substances, and that require the ONDCP to oppose any attempts to legalize schedule I substances.Still, there are questions as to whether this bill has the ability to pass.Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University, says that the bill is a “modest proposal” and “it might be possible for it to gain the bipartisan support it needs to pass”.Cat Packer, director of Drug Markets and Legal Regulation at Drug Policy Alliance, notes that the bill “has the potential to attract bipartisan support as a modest but meaningful step forward” due to it prioritizing “evidence over ideology”.Though more comprehensive federal cannabis reform might be in the distant future, “the EBDPA should be seen as a neutral step that would enable policymakers to study what works – and be better prepared to craft effective, informed legislation in the future,” Packer added.On the other hand, Aaron Smith, CEO of the National Cannabis Industry Association, doesn’t feel as hopeful and that because of “the hyper-partisan times we live in, getting this bill, or any legislation, frankly, passed isn’t likely in the near term”.Packer hopes that policymakers will see that the bill is vital for shaping smart cannabis policy.“The federal government cannot meaningfully learn from the experiences of the 24-plus states that have legalized cannabis,” Packer says of the current state of affairs.There aren’t ways at the moment for the federal government to scientifically measure cannabis’ impact on youth consumption and health outcomes, arrest and incarceration rates, and who benefits economically from legal cannabis policies, versus who is left out.Existing policy is not only outdated, but there’s “an institutional blindfold that prevents the federal government from adapting to real-world conditions and designing effective, responsive policies”, Packer said.Ideally, Harris says the law would lead to “an increase in rigorous research to inform medical use practice”, noting that there are many questions when it comes to how cannabis functions as a medicine, about ideal doses, long term-impacts of different consumption methods, and whether certain strains work better for some conditions than others.While Omar and Titius have emphasized cannabis when promoting the bill, it would allow federal funding to go toward research on other schedule I substances as well.Smith said that “drug policy should be rooted in scientific fact” and that any step in that direction should be applauded. Harris echoed that sentiment, noting that research on other schedule I substances is “much needed,” given that “several substances in schedule I – psilocybin and MDMA in particular, seem to have therapeutic effects for some people with difficult-to-treat conditions”. Federally funded medical research on the efficacy of these drugs could advance medicine in the US.“If there is evidence to support FDA approval for a schedule I drug for therapeutic applications, this bill would mean that the Office of National Drug Control Policy would not have to reflexively oppose it,” Harris said.Should the bill pass, Harris is skeptical of how much federal funding will actually go to schedule I research as “the Trump administration, so far, has seemed opposed to federal research funding more broadly”.Still, she says: “This bill is an important and reasonable effort to improve the sensibility of federal drug policies, but the current climate could dampen its short-term effects.” More

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      Lawyer who prosecuted Trump hauled in front of House judiciary committee

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      The former special counsel prosecutor Jay Bratt is scheduled to appear before the Republican-led House judiciary committee next week as it attempts to find instances of politicization in the federal criminal cases brought against Donald Trump, according to three people familiar with the matter.The deposition of Bratt, who led the criminal case over Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents as a top deputy to the former special counsel Jack Smith, has been scheduled for 10am ET next Wednesday, according to a notice reviewed by the Guardian.Bratt’s appearance is the first known instance of a special counsel prosecutor being hauled before the judiciary committee since Trump took office vowing revenge and personally directing the firings of more than a dozen prosecutors who worked for Smith within days of his inauguration.It was not clear how long the deposition might last and whether Bratt planned to invoke any privileges to avoid testifying. A spokesperson for the judiciary committee did not immediately respond to questions about the deposition.Smith charged Trump in two cases: in Florida, for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and defying a subpoena commanding their return; and in Washington, for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The classified documents case was dismissed before it went to trial by the US district judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled that Smith had been unlawfully appointed because he was acting with the powers of a “principal officer” at the justice department, which requires confirmation by the US Senate.The topics that House investigators have prepared for Bratt were also not clear. But the judiciary committee, led by Republican chair Jim Jordan, has long believed that the special counsel cases were the result of political animus against Trump at the justice department.In repeated letters to the former special counsel last year, House investigators demanded information from Smith about contacts between the Biden White House and the justice department about the criminal cases, including when Bratt once travelled to the White House.They also sought documents and communications about meetings between FBI and justice department officials before the decision was made to ask a magistrate judge for a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago. Bratt is widely understood to have encouraged FBI leaders to obtain a warrant.The warrant later proved to be the basis for the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice charges against Trump; the FBI retrieved 101 classified documents despite Trump’s lawyers having previously claimed that they had complied with an earlier subpoena to return all classified materials.The House judiciary committee has also taken a special interest in a fraught and disputed meeting between then-Trump legal team attorney Stanley Woodward and Bratt at justice department headquarters during the height of the classified documents case in November 2022.The Guardian previously reported on the complaint that Woodward filed in federal district court in Washington about the meeting, where he alleged Bratt discussed Woodward’s application to be a judge while trying to get the cooperation of Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet and Woodward’s client.In the filing, Woodward alleged that Bratt told him he did not think Woodward was a “Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing” and get Nauta to testify against Trump in the classified documents case.The allegation was that Bratt had engaged in possible misconduct by suggesting Woodward’s judgeship application might be considered more favorably if he convinced his client to flip. The matter was referred to the justice department’s office of professional responsibility but it does not appear as though any action was taken.The extent of any potential impact on the case was unclear, since the meeting did not appear to have directly affected any testimony Nauta gave to prosecutors, and Bratt would not have had the ability to influence such an application, which is handled by the White House counsel’s office. More

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      Republican Agenda Hits Familiar Obstacle: State and Local Taxes

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      A small group of Republicans are threatening to torpedo President Trump’s agenda over the state and local tax deduction, long a headache for both parties.It was perhaps inevitable that the Republican effort to pass a vast fiscal package this year would, at some point, get caught up in the thicket of the state and local tax deduction.After all, the deduction, often called SALT, has long had the potential to cause a political standoff. Many G.O.P. lawmakers abhor it and, in 2017, imposed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes Americans can write off on their federal returns. But to pass a tax bill this year, the party will need the support of a motivated clutch of Republicans who have made lifting that cap the animating promise of their political careers.Those lawmakers, who represent high-tax states like New York and New Jersey where the deduction is cherished, say they are willing to tank the package over the issue. Representative Nick LaLota, Republican of New York, can already visualize voting against the bill.“There’s a green ‘yes’ button and there’s a red ‘no’ button to press. Come time, if there’s not enough SALT in this bill, I’m pressing the red ‘no’ button,” he said. “It is a hill I am willing to stake my entire congressional career on.”Attempts by House Republican leaders to reach a deal with members like Mr. LaLota yielded little progress this week, leaving the issue unresolved as G.O.P. lawmakers prepare to release the first draft of their tax bill next week. Along with Medicaid, the health care program for the poor that Republicans have targeted for cuts, the state and local tax deduction could determine the fate of the entire G.O.P. legislative agenda.That’s because any change to the current $10,000 limit would be incredibly expensive, threatening to swamp the overall Republican budget for tax cuts. Even a relatively modest change, like doubling the cap for married couples, would cost $230 billion over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. More generous alterations along the lines of what New York Republicans have demanded could surpass $1 trillion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Writing Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Face Risks on Medicaid

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      Representatives from swing districts face tough votes as soon as next week, when key House panels are scheduled to consider legislation that would cut popular programs to pay for President Trump’s agenda.Gabe Evans, then a Republican state lawmaker in Colorado, defeated a Democratic member of Congress in November by less than 1 percentage point — just 2,449 votes — writing his ticket to Washington.Now Mr. Evans, 39, is helping to write legislation that could cement his own ticket back home.The first-term congressman, whose swing district just north of Denver includes 151,749 Medicaid recipients, sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee. The Republican budget resolution that lays the groundwork for sweeping legislation to enact President Trump’s domestic agenda instructs the panel, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, to slash spending by $880 billion over the next decade to help pay for a large tax cut. That number is impossible to reach without substantially reducing the cost of Medicaid, the government program that provides health insurance for lower-income Americans.As Republicans in Congress struggle to coalesce around the core pieces of what Mr. Trump calls his “one big, beautiful bill,” Mr. Evans and other G.O.P. lawmakers from some of the most competitive districts in the country are facing committee votes next week to approve cuts to popular programs that could come back to haunt them politically.And Democrats are gleeful at the prospect of Republican incumbents going on the record supporting the effort.“These members of Congress won with fewer votes than the number of people in their district on Medicaid,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist and a former spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Voting for this is like being the captain of the Titanic and deciding to intentionally hit the iceberg.”The group includes Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa, who also sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee and is on even shakier ground than Mr. Evans, despite having warded off a challenger multiple times. Last year, Ms. Miller-Meeks, who represents 132,148 Medicaid recipients, won her seat by 0.2 percent, or 799 votes. Her local office in Davenport has been besieged by demonstrators concerned about spending cuts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      House Votes to Rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America, Taking a Symbolic Step

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      The legislation was all but certain to die in the Senate, but the move put the Republican-led House on the record supporting President Trump’s nomenclature.A divided House on Thursday approved legislation to permanently rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, moving over the taunting objections of Democrats to codify President Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water in line with his “America First” worldview.The 211-to-206 mostly party-line vote to pass the bill amounted to a symbolic show of Republican deference to Mr. Trump, given that Democrats are unlikely to allow the legislation to move forward in the Senate. But it put the G.O.P.-led House on the record backing the president in his effort to rewrite the rules of geography and to dare critics to defy him.Just one Republican, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, voted no.The White House has barred journalists from The Associated Press from covering events in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One, as punishment for the news organization’s continued use of the name Gulf of Mexico.“The American people deserve pride in their country, and pride in the waters that we own and we protect with our military and our Coast Guard,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who sponsored the bill, calling it “one of the most important things we can do this Congress.”Democrats dismissed the legislation as a pandering and performative waste of time when Republicans were struggling to reach agreement on legislation to fulfill the president’s domestic policy agenda — the “big, beautiful bill” that could include unpopular cuts to Medicaid.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, called it a “silly, small-minded and sycophantic piece of legislation.” He said the only silver lining of the exercise was that it underscored how Republicans were laboring to enact that domestic policy measure, which he warned would impose the largest Medicaid cut in history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      House panel on campus antisemitism likened to cold-war ‘un-American’ committee

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      A congressional panel investigating antisemitism on US college campuses on Wednesday was accused of trying to chill constitutionally protected free speech and likened to a cold-war era committee notorious for wrecking the lives of people suspected of communist sympathies.The comparison was made by David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University law centre, who told the House education and workforce committee that its proceedings resembled those staged by the House un-American Activities Committee (Huac) during and after the second world war.Cole, a former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, accused the present-day committee of “broad-based charges of antisemitism without any factual predicate”.“These proceedings, with all due respect, have more in common with those of the House un-American Activities Committee,” he told committee members. “They are not an attempt to find out what happened, but an attempt to chill protected speech.”HUAC, originally formed in 1938 to investigate Nazi subversion, switched focus to communism after the war and grew infamous after its high-profile hearings – including into suspected communism in Hollywood – led to blacklists and people losing their jobs.Cole’s criticism came in the eighth hearing held by the committee, which has previously looked into antisemitism sparked by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests at elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The Trump administration has demanded sweeping changes in the governance of some of the country’s leading universities, including Harvard – prompting a backlash from academics and administrators, who believe antisemitism is being used as a pretext to curtail academic freedom.Pervious hearings had led to the resignations of several university heads after they were deemed to have given legalistic responses to questions – mainly posed by Republicans – over whether certain anti-Israeli slogans were genocidal or protected by free speech.Wednesday’s hearing included presidents from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, DePaul University in Chicago and California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.Even before it began, questions were raised about how truly concerned some members of Congress were prejudiced against Jews.A memo signed by Haverford academics – most of them Jewish – and reported by the Guardian expressed concern that one had quoted Adolf Hitler, others had failed to condemn antisemitic activity in their districts, and Tim Walberg, the committee’s Republican chair, had links to a Christian group that “trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity”.Jewish Voice for Peace, a leftwing group, took nine Jewish students from Columbia to Capitol Hill to meet members of Congress on Tuesday, while condemning the hearings as “McCarthyite” and more concerned with suppressing pro-Palestinian protest than antisemitism.Walberg told the hearing campus antisemitism “continues to traumatize students, faculty and staff”. He cited a letter from a group of Jewish students at Haverford who claimed to have been “marginalized, ostracized and at times, outright attacked. College officials reacted with “indifference”, he said.Cole, who had been called as a witness by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott, said the hearings were flawed on free speech grounds and for focusing on the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, which – under Title VI – outlaws discrimination in education on the grounds of race, colour or national origin in institutions receiving federal funding.“Antisemitic speech, while lamentable, is constitutionally protected, just like racist speech, sexist speech and homophobic speech,” he said, adding that the US supreme court had defended the rights of the Nazi party to march in a town where Holocaust survivors lived.On civil rights, he said: “Title VI does not prohibit antisemitic speech. An antisemitic slogan at a protest or online does not deny equal access to education any more than a sexist or a racist comment.”More broadly, Cole said, committee members had not conducted proper investigations into specific incidents.“Getting to the bottom of what happened requires fair hearings where both sides are heard about specific incidents,” he said. “This committee has not held a single hearing looking into a specific incident, having the perpetrator and the complainant testify.”Suzanne Bonamici, a Democratic representative from Oregon, who is Jewish, cited a letter from 100 Jewish faculty members at Northwestern University in Illinois expressing “serious concerns” about how the committee was addressing antisemitism.“We are united by the conviction that our Jewishness must not be used as a cudgel to silence the vigorous exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of university life,” she quoted them as saying.She added: “As an active member of my synagogue for more than 25 years, I can no longer pretend that this is a good-faith effort to root out antisemitism.”Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York, who rose to prominence in December 2023 with a high-profile cross-examination that prompted the resignation of the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, tried a similar tack with Haverford’s head, Wendy Raymond.“Is calling for the genocide of Jews protected speech on your campus?” Stefanik asked.Raymond replied that it was not, but struggled to answer when asked if students or staff had been disciplined or investigated for using such language. Stefanik said: “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”She added: “For the American people watching, you still don’t get it. Haverford still doesn’t get it. It’s a very different testimony than the other presidents who are here today, who are coming with specifics. This is completely unacceptable. Higher education has failed to address this gorge of antisemitism, putting Jewish students at risk at Haverford and other campuses across the country.” More