House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered a plain message at his weekly press conference Tuesday: Congress must pass the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act by Independence Day, July 4.
Johnson, R-La., has labored over the legislation since before President Donald Trump’s election in November, and it would fulfill major campaign promises, such as extending the president’s first-term 2017 tax cuts before their expiration at the end of the year and funding border security and defense.
“We just had a big House Republican Conference meeting, our weekly meeting, and I said, ‘Make sure your schedule is flexible.’” said Johnson, who added he thinks the Senate will pass the bill on “Friday, maybe Saturday.”
That echoes Trump’s message on Truth Social on Tuesday morning that “NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE.”
Both houses of Congress are scheduled to break on Friday for recess until July 7, but Johnson says that passing the bill is of the highest priority, even if that means getting home right before the fireworks start flying on the night of July 4.
“There’s nothing more important that we should be involved in, we can be involved in than getting the one big, beautiful bill to the president’s desk,” he said.
But that won’t be easy.
The Senate has already made significant changes to the House’s bill, such as making more tax cuts permanent, lessening the severity of the reversal of Biden-era green energy incentives, and reducing the substantial increase in the cap on state and local tax deductions on federal taxes.
“I remain very optimistic that there’s not going to be a wide chasm between the two products, what the Senate produces and what we produce,” said Johnson.
Another speed bump on the way to passing the package through both houses is how Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled against supposedly extraneous provisions of the bill.
Under the Senate’s “Byrd Rule,” the parliamentarian—essentially, the chamber’s rule keeper—can throw out provisions that she does not think belong in a 10-year budget framework.
McDonough has been gutting many proposed cost-saving reforms, such as having states share more of the cost of food stamp programs if they have a higher payment-error rate.
Senate Republicans are currently working to tweak provisions so that they can survive the parliamentarian’s judgments.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told The Daily Signal that it’s too soon to tell whether these changes will delay passage of the bill and make it more difficult to get over the finish line and to the president’s desk.
“Well, they’re going back and forth on that now,” he said.
“We knew that process would eventually happen, and they’re in the middle of that process, and it could go on for a few more days, and then we’ve got to evaluate it. It’s too early to evaluate. Right now, I want to see a final product from the Senate.”
