House Narrowly Passes Big Budget Resolution

With a push from President Trump, House Republicans sent a GOP budget blueprint to passage Tuesday, a step toward delivering his "big, beautiful bill" with $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts despite a wall of opposition from Democrats and discomfort among Republicans.

• House Speaker Mike Johnson had almost no votes to spare in his bare-bones GOP majority and fought on all fronts—against Democrats, uneasy rank-and-file Republicans, and skeptical GOP senators—to advance the party's signature legislative package, the AP reports. Trump made calls to wayward GOP lawmakers and invited Republicans to the White House.

• The vote was 217-215, with a single Republican—Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky—and all Democrats present opposed, and the outcome was in jeopardy until the gavel. "On a vote like this, you're always going to have people you're talking to all the way through the close of the vote," Majority Leader Steve Scalise said before the roll call. "We got it done," Johnson said afterward. Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva did not vote, the Washington Post reports.
• Next steps are long and cumbersome before anything can become law—weeks of committee hearings to draft the details and send the House version to the Senate, where Republicans passed their own scaled-back version. And more big votes are ahead, including an unrelated deal to prevent a government shutdown when federal funding expires March 14. Those talks are also underway.

• Democrats during an afternoon debate decried the package as a "betrayal" of Americans, a "blueprint for American decline," and simply a "Republican rip-off." "Our very way of life as a country is under assault," House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the steps of the Capitol.
• The Republican majority in the House is so tight that confirmation hearings for Rep. Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the United Nations have not been scheduled, the New York Times reports. "I had 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats, and then President Trump began to cull the herd," Johnson said Monday. "We have a one-vote margin now—smallest in history, right?"
  

(More federal budget stories.)