House Republicans were way down in the count.
They were desperately trying to pass a procedural motion on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to set up a final vote to approve it. The political stakes couldn’t be higher.
All 212 House Democrats quickly voted no, and at one point in the middle of the night, the roll call was stuck at 207 for and 217 against, with five Republican no votes and 8 GOP lawmakers not yet voting. Most of the eight were threatening to reject the bill.
The vote was technically scheduled to be 15 minutes. It lasted seven hours and 23 minutes.
There certainly was a lot of time to kill. Some members had adult beverages, others ordered take-out, and many caught cat naps. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a devout Southern Baptist and evangelical Christian, stopped by the House chapel to pray.
Days earlier, the Senate had narrowly passed its version of the OBBBA, and now House leadership had to convince its members to accept the changes made to the legislation and send it to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4. Getting House members to back a Senate measure is usually difficult, especially on high-profile legislation.
House Republican leaders worked on the holdouts, as did Trump, through many phone calls. It looked like a dire situation, but House GOP officials insisted to the Washington Examiner that they were confident. They had come too far to fall short. And after all, there’s no limit on how long a vote can be, so they were all in, no matter how long it took.
The math, however, was difficult. Leadership could afford only two no votes, so three of the five had to reverse their votes, and all of the eight Republicans who hadn’t hit the button needed to back the legislation. It would take a while.
Summoned to the White House
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was one of a handful of Republicans summoned to the White House in the final homestretch of the GOP-led Congress, trying to pass the big beautiful bill.
But unlike his GOP colleagues joining him on the journey to Pennsylvania Avenue on July 2, 2025, Donalds wasn’t invited because he was withholding his support for the massive tax-and-spending bill. Donalds, a key ally of Trump, was called to the White House to serve as a liaison between the remaining holdouts, which included members of the House Freedom Caucus, with which Donalds is aligned, and the administration.
“It happens that way sometimes,” Donalds told the Washington Examiner. “Sometimes you’re a holdout. Sometimes you’re trying to help bridge the gap.”
Donalds, who is running for governor of Florida, said he had been involved in several meetings with the president and his advisers during the crafting of the legislation.
“I think the White House just wanted to have somebody who, obviously, who’s been in the room, but that members have a relationship with to make sure we got everybody’s vote,” he said.
Also in attendance was Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who posted on social media that he was being called to the White House, but quipped it was not clear if it was to go “behind the woodshed” or to the White House itself.
Trump has yielded unparalleled power this session of Congress, often being called upon to get legislation across the finish line, and that power was on full display as Republican leadership tried to get the party-line bill to his desk by a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
But as Burchett tells it, Trump didn’t browbeat the holdouts. Burchett, who went into the meeting with concerns over spending, described the meeting as “intense,” but said the president “took all the questions and he answered the ones he knew.”
“Some people are afraid to admit they don’t know the answer, and they’ll tell you the wrong dadgum answer,” Burchett recalled. “Not Trump. He would say, ‘You got a question about this?’ He goes, ‘Well, let’s find out.’ He’d point, and the person would boom, and they’d hit it, and it was, it just, to me, it was a lot cooler than a lot of situations I’d been in.”
Burchett entered the White House as undecided. But he left singing Trump’s praises and towing mementos from the meeting, including a nameplate the president signed after correcting a misspelling of Burchett’s name. (Burchett told the Washington Examiner that there was an “e” tacked onto the end of his name.)
Burchett recalled sitting two seats down from Trump, with Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) between him and the president, when he noticed the misspelled nameplate.
“I asked him,” Burchett said. “I say, “Y’all misspelled my name.”
Burchett said Trump took the nameplate and scribbled out the extra letter. Burchett smiled and said, “You got to initial it … like you’re correcting your English papers.”
Going 100 miles per hour
Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) was very stressed.
The self-described Reagan Republican, who has served as a church deacon and taught Sunday school, was driving more than 100 miles per hour in his GMC Sierra pickup. Moran was scrambling to make the House Ways and Means Committee’s markup of the biggest tax legislation in years. And this frantic race against time was going down to the wire.
Elected in 2021, Moran had championed Trump’s no taxes on overtime idea in the House. Flight delays had jeopardized Moran’s initial itinerary, so he shifted to Plan B by taking a new flight at another Texas airport more than two hours away.
“I’m not lying to you, I drove 110 miles an hour to get to the Dallas airport on time,” Moran said.
Moran, who got his law degree from Texas Tech, relayed what was happening to his aides.
“At some point, I was trying to communicate with my staff about preparing what I would have to say to an officer when he stopped me, because I was sure I was going to get stopped on the way to the airport.”
Moran said he shaved 30 minutes off that trip and got there in about an hour and 45 minutes.
“I got to the gate about two minutes before they closed the door.”
It was the beginning of a long day as the panel began the first marathon overnight session of turning the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into what it is today.
“I think I had like six double cappuccinos that night just trying to stay awake,” Moran said.
Trump on the line
Trump, aboard Air Force One flying back from the Middle East, was on the line wanting to know what had happened.
The House Budget Committee had just voted down his big beautiful bill, and on the other end was the panel’s chairman, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), who told the president he called for the roll call, knowing it would fail.
It was May 16, six months after Trump won the popular vote as he captured all seven battleground states against then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Like all newly elected presidents, Trump had political capital to spend. But it wouldn’t last forever.
Trump’s momentum on his signature bill had screeched to a halt as a handful of Republicans joined all Democrats on the budget panel to torpedo the legislation.
The headlines were rough. “Conservatives block Trump’s big bill in stunning setback”; “Republicans sink their own budget bill full of president’s priorities”; and “GOP fiscal hawks sink key vote on Trump big, beautiful bill.”
Arrington said Trump wasn’t yelling or even upset. But the Texas legislator admitted his strategy was unusual.
“Who calls a vote if they know they don’t have the votes?” Arrington, the loquacious son of a tractor salesman, asked rhetorically.
Arrington told Trump he wanted to get his committee members on the record “so that we can reconcile the concerns they have now, and not … have to hold it up and negotiate when it’s on the House floor, and [Trump] seemed to be very supportive of that.”
He added, “I thought it was a kind of, quite a Trump-esque thing to do, call them out, let them voice their opposition and their concerns that needed to be resolved, so that the entire country, their voters from their district, and every member knew who was opposed to it at this point and what their concerns were.”
Arrington worked closely with House Republican leadership on the Big Beautiful Bill. Yet he had previously clashed with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and at the beginning of 2025, anonymous Republican sources were ripping Arrington in the press, doubting that he could get the job done.
Now, his committee had rejected Trump’s No. 1 legislative priority, and all of a sudden, the GOP’s goal of getting the measure passed by July 4 was in jeopardy.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) told the Washington Examiner he was a bit startled by Arrington’s game plan.
“I mean, it was a big risk, but as it turned out, everything worked out just fine,” Emmer said.
The Budget Committee met again roughly 48 hours later, at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, and passed the bill out of the House Budget Committee. The four Republicans who voted no on Friday — Reps. Josh Brecheen (OK), Andrew Clyde (GA), Ralph Norman (SC), and Chip Roy (TX) — voted “present” on Sunday. It certainly wasn’t a huge sign of unity, but it was a win, albeit a messy one.
“After we were able to work through that at committee, I thought that was the appropriate route to take, and I think it proved to be successful,” Arrington said. “The president totally understood it, totally understood why I made that call, and was supportive of it.”
The work was hardly done, however, as the resolution was headed to the floor. The Budget Committee Republican fiscal hawks and others in the House GOP Conference were pushing for greater savings, while centrists were wary of the Medicaid cut provisions. No Democrat was going to back the budget blueprint, so leadership could only lose a couple of Republicans. And with a July 4 deadline embraced by Trump to get the legislation to his desk, House Republican leaders knew that hitting the brakes wasn’t in the cards.
Scalise tries to get Mike Johnson to have a drink
There were a handful of tight votes on the floor on the bill, but House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said the final vote pales in comparison to the April 10 budget vote on the floor.
“The budget is the hardest vote,” Scalise told the Washington Examiner, adding it’s harder for members to oppose actual policy than numbers that set parameters of the underlying legislation.
Scalise said eight GOP members had indicated on X that they were going to oppose the budget. That was a big problem.
Johnson broached the option of punting instead of trying to create the votes on the floor. Scalise said he wanted to go for it. They rolled the dice.
The press was “frothing” that day, Scalise said.
A reporter asked him, “When the bill fails, what is Plan B?”
Scalise confidently replied, “Failure is not an option.”
And sure enough, after House GOP leaders button-holed their members on the floor one by one, the budget passed 216-214. It was an enormous triumph for leadership officials, who have had their share of disappointment in this Congress.
That budget triumph was the moment that Scalise knew the big beautiful bill was going to get to Trump’s desk because they had captured a ton of momentum.
It was far from the end of the road, but many House Republicans were ready to party. They held a bash in the Lincoln Room just off the House floor that was marked by toasts, hugs, and high-fives.
A fired-up Scalise tried to get Johnson, a genteel southerner who doesn’t drink, to down a shot of Fireball. With a laugh, Scalise recounted that he nearly got Johnson to do it.
Taking one for the team
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) was mad and wasn’t backing down.
Zinke, who served as Trump’s Interior secretary in the president’s first term, had previously told House leadership that he would vote no on budget reconciliation if provisions selling public lands were included in the final bill. And that’s exactly what was added to the sprawling legislation by the Natural Resources Committee in early May of 2025 as House Republican leaders desperately looked for savings in the reconciliation effort to lower the measure’s price tag.
Zinke wouldn’t bend, going so far as to create a new bipartisan caucus focused on conserving public lands to block Reps. Mark Amodei (R-NV) and Celeste Maloy’s (R-UT) provisions that would have sold hundreds of thousands of federal acres in Nevada and Utah.
The rough and tough conservative, who can be spotted marching around the Capitol donning a cowboy hat, repeatedly called the public land sales a “red line” for him, no matter the legislation it was attached to.
“The fundamental idea that you’re going to sell public land and somehow that’s going to pay off … $36 trillion debt is folly,” Zinke said at the time. “We don’t have a land problem. I would say we have a management problem. … I understand the anger out there if you live in Montana or a lot of Utah where you’re limited on access. But I give the analogy: If you don’t like the management of a hotel, you don’t sell the hotel, you get new management.”
Most importantly, Zinke made it clear to leadership that unless the language permitting the federal land sales was stripped, he would be voting no.
What was not known at the time was that Amodei didn’t write the amendment that he and Maloy endorsed. The lawmakers were actually given the language by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) and the House Speaker’s office.
Amodei told the Washington Examiner that House leadership approached his office ahead of the committee’s markup hearing on its portion of the broader reconciliation bill, and asked if he would put his name on the land sales amendment.
Maloy’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The provisions were written to help communities in Nevada and Utah create jobs and economic growth through housing construction and other initiatives. It would also reduce the cost of the legislation, which was a huge concern for GOP fiscal hawks in the House. Johnson was looking for savings from every committee to help finance the overall legislation and needed to appease the Freedom Caucus.
Amodei had long pushed for the sale of federal lands during his 15-year stint in Congress and was known for backing bipartisan legislation that also included provisions focused specifically on setting aside land for conservation. This version did not include any of that.
Amodei, known for being a team player, didn’t love the pared-back language and told the Washington Examiner, “It wasn’t the answer to all of our prayers, but it was an opportunity to get the process started.”
With Amodei and Maloy on board, Johnson had just one obstacle left to use the land sales to offset the budget: Zinke.
House leadership was aware of his opposition to any land sales, well before the committee’s markup. Even in the hours before the amendment was introduced, Johnson, Westerman, and Amodei debated whether they should move forward. The Nevada congressman recalled sitting in Westerman’s office that night, discussing the matter with the speaker over the phone.
“I hope he’s bluffing,” Johnson said of Zinke, and together they decided to proceed as planned.
Unfortunately for Johnson, Zinke stood his ground, and he wasn’t the only one putting their vote on the line. Other members, including Reps. Troy Downing (R-MT) and Mike Simpson (R-ID) also came out against the proposal.
There were attempts to negotiate a deal between Zinke and Amodei, and at one point, Westerman approached his Nevada counterpart to ask about striking certain parts of the bill. A confused Amodei pointed out that it wasn’t his amendment to begin with.
It isn’t clear if Zinke was aware that House leadership orchestrated the land sales to be added to the bill despite his public opposition. His office declined to comment.
Facing pressure from the White House to get the House version of budget reconciliation to the floor, Johnson was faced with a choice: Call Zinke’s bluff again and risk losing more votes, or strike the amendment.
Amodei said the decision to cut the language was made in just a matter of two or three days. However, it wasn’t formally dropped until just before the bill hit the floor for a vote.
In the meantime, Amodei faced the brunt of the blame for the public land sales proposal, being accused of sneaking the amendment into the panel’s bill in the middle of the night. (Amodei notes he couldn’t have sought his amendment until around midnight during the markup due to the dozens of Democratic amendments that were up first.)
“Congress Sneaks Massive Public Land Sell-Off Into Midnight Budget Amendment,” one headline from outdoors magazine Field and Stream read.
“Amodei outrages NV congressional colleagues with ‘dead of night’ federal land sales amendment,” an article with the Nevada Current was titled.
Amodei had already announced he wasn’t running for reelection, but the criticism still stung.
“It was a s*** storm,” Amodei told the Washington Examiner.
What’s unclear is whether the whole lands amendment was a shrewd tactic by Johnson to secure Zinke’s vote. Many rank-and-file members can ask their leaders for one big thing, and if they get it, they can’t realistically request a second. Zinke won his public battle, and Johnson and his team moved on to other possible no Republican votes. Still, Amodei has scars from the legislative showdown.
“I got the blame, and that’s how it works,” Amodei said wistfully.
‘Tension’ between the Speaker and the Ways and Means Committee
Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) wanted to hit the gas on moving an early iteration of the Big Beautiful Bill through his panel, the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
The chairman had spent more than two years working on the legislation’s content. During the last part of the Biden administration, Smith and his panel had heard testimony in field hearings across the country on tax policy and the economy.
Following Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Smith spent New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago talking to Trump about converting his campaign promises into legislation.
Early last year, Smith holed up his Ways and Means Committee Republicans at the Library of Congress to start crafting the bill. Smith, who represents one of the poorest districts in the country, said he “locked them up for 60 hours” that week.
One of his first messages to his colleagues was a threat: If you leak anything to the media, “you will not be a part of this committee.”
Smith told the Washington Examiner that passing the bill was “too important for America” and that he “was not going to be the Republican Ways and Means Committee Chairman who allowed the single largest tax increase on his watch.”
In May of 2025, Smith was poised to mark up his legislation, but the language on state and local taxes was triggering GOP protests from Republicans representing blue states. Smith had proposed lifting the $10,000 SALT limit to a permanent $30,000 threshold for those making $400,000 or less. However, the SALT caucus wanted more.
Johnson urged Smith to hold off on publicly releasing his legislative text, seeking to buy more time to strike a deal. But Smith was antsy.
“This was my life for two-and-a-half years,” Smith said, confirming that he was resisting leadership’s push not to release the bill language.
Sean Clerget, chief tax counsel for the Ways and Means Committee at the time, noted the panel must release bills at least 24 hours before marking them up. So almost right out of the gate, Republicans were facing a missed deadline as they aimed to get the legislation to Trump by July 4.
“I was not going to allow it to be stalled,” Smith said.
The SALT caucus wasn’t happy and was deep in talks with Johnson.
Clerget said the committee wanted to hit “send,” putting the bill online, at 2 p.m. Reluctantly, Smith held off. But 30 minutes later, Smith had had enough.
He told Clerget to release the bill. Clerget hit send.
Soon thereafter, aides suggested they had an arrangement worked out. Smith said that the bill was out.
“There was some tension in the room,” Clerget said.
During the Ways and Means markup, Johnson arrived through a back door to the Ways and Means library and negotiated with the SALT lawmakers for hours. A deal was still far off.
The final votes in the House
Lawmakers in the House would occasionally look up at the “scoreboard,” but it wasn’t moving. It was still at 207-217.
Burchett was on the House floor in the early morning hours when he got a call from a number he didn’t recognize as GOP leadership tried to cobble together the votes.
While not recognizing the number, Burchett picked up the call anyway to a man who said his name was “Charlie.”
Burchett, who has a brother named Charlie, asked: “Charlie who?”
“Charlie Kirk,” the co-founder of Turning Point USA responded.
This was the last time Burchett spoke to Kirk, who was assassinated in September.
The Tennessee Republican said Kirk wanted to know why he hadn’t voted for the party-line bill yet. “He didn’t, he didn’t understand my strategy,” Burchett said.
Burchett said he asked if Kirk had spoken to the president and speaker yet, to which Kirk replied, “No, I’m just watching it on C-SPAN like everybody else.”
“I thought, dude, you need to get a life,” Burchett joked. “It’s 3 o’clock in the dadgum morning.”
“The last thing he said was, he’s coming to D.C. soon,” Burchett said. “We’d have dinner. We’d have supper together.”
By withholding his vote on the floor, even though he had mostly committed to voting yes, Burchett said he was able to act as a “conduit” for the remaining holdouts to get their demands across to leadership.
Their asks for spending reforms were always extensive, but they had escalated since Moody’s downgraded the country’s long-range credit rating.
Burchett recalled tempers flaring on the House floor, saying there was “cussing and yelling at people and being stupid.”
Burchett declined to name names.
“They weren’t following what I was doing. … They might have had too much drink and was running their dadgum mouths,” Burchett said.
Fatigue factor
Fatigue played a significant role in Republican leaders ultimately getting the votes. Members were running on fumes after many sleep-deprived nights in a row. The resolve of the on-the-fence lawmakers weakened as Trump and GOP leaders turned up the pressure.
Exhaustion wasn’t just limited to the House. Days earlier, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID), one of the authors of the big beautiful bill, was struggling to keep his eyes open.
Crapo told the Washington Examiner, “I went in on the floor just before something was going to happen on the [Senate] floor, and I looked up at the clock, and … it was like 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock, and I thought, ‘Wow, how did it get that late?’ and then somebody pointed out to me that it was the next morning.”
The conservative holdouts in the House included Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Victoria Spartz (R-IN), Andy Harris (R-MD), and a handful of others.
Smith, the Ways and Means chairman, said there were some “ridiculous” last-minute requests. But eventually, the few nos changed to yeses, and all the holdouts voted yes. The motion passed 219-213, and the final bill cleared 218-214 after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) ripped the legislation in a floor speech that lasted more than eight hours.
HOW THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL BECAME LAW: READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S 10-PART SERIES
The media, which had reported on a slew of legislator ultimatums throughout the spring and summer, said the rebels “caved,” and in many ways, they did. The concessions they received were fairly minimal.
But lawmakers and aides interviewed for this series said the hardliners made a difference throughout the debate and kept the bill’s price tag down. Regardless, many conservatives who ended up voting yes called it a missed opportunity.
Callie Patteson, Zach Halaschak, and Bob Cusack contributed to this report.
Members of the Washington Examiner’s staff who have worked on this series over the past several months are Haris Alic, Hailey Bullis, Bob Cusack, Christian Datoc, James A. Downs, Gabrielle M. Etzel, Lauren Green, Zach Halaschak, Chris Irvine, Joseph Lawler, Naomi Lim, Maydeen Merino, Callie Patteson, Mabinty Quarshie, Samantha-Jo Roth, David Sivak, and Ramsey Touchberry.