More than three days after taking to the Senate floor to begin legislative proceedings – and more than a year after negotiations first quietly began with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump – Senate Republicans have at last passed their enormous legislative package dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” on a 51-50 vote, with enormous implications for tax policies, Medicaid, and more if it’s ultimately signed into law.
New Jersey’s two senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, have been committed opponents of the bill for months, as have all of their fellow Democratic senators. And their objections to the bill only increased as it sprinted through this weekend’s tangled legislative rush: the last-minute amendments, the changes made in order to mollify key GOP senators, the dead-of-night votes.
“This is no way to govern,” Kim told the New Jersey Globe. “This is no way to vote on and consider a piece of legislation that is going to have such a consequential impact on this country… Nobody that I talk to in the Senate, in either party, knows how this will all fully play out in terms of just how damaging this could be.”
“For months, I’ve heard from people across New Jersey and throughout the country who will suffer as a result of this bill,” Booker said in a statement. “They are seniors, working parents, people with disabilities, small businesses, farmers, and low-income families. By passing this bill, Senate Republicans have failed them all. There is only one beautiful thing about this bill: it is a clarion call for change in Washington.”
The bill now has to go back to the House, which passed a prior version of the One Big Beautiful Bill in May. The changes made by the Senate – some of which softened the bill, others of which made it even more conservative – could make it a hard sell for the GOP’s extremely tight majority. That puts the pressure on New Jersey Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), Chris Smith (R-Manchester), and Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), who all supported the bill in its original incarnation and could have substantial sway over whether it passes again.
At the core of the bill are two key policies: making President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent and slashing a huge amount of funding from Medicaid, the health care program for low-income and disabled Americans, via work requirements and other policy shifts. The former policy, Republicans argue, will unlock economic growth and help the middle-class; the latter part, Democrats say, means that millions fewer Americans will have health coverage, which they argue would be disastrous for hospitals, and state governments, and Medicaid recipients themselves.
An estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the increase in uninsured Americans at nearly 12 million; outside analyses have also found that the bill would tend to boost incomes for high-income Americans and lower them for low-income Americans.
But the bill also touches on an enormous number of other important policy debates, from scaling back clean energy tax credits to raising the debt ceiling to cutting back on food stamps to substantially increasing spending on national defense and border security.
In a sign of how volatile the bill was up until this afternoon’s vote, one provision that would have limited states’ ability to put new regulations on artificial intelligence was stripped out at the last minute via amendment. (Democrats, and some Republicans, also offered a large number of other amendments to soften the bill’s impacts on Medicaid and other programs, but most were rejected by the Republican majority.)
A particularly important part of the bill from a New Jersey perspective is the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, which was established at $10,000 during the first Trump administration (and which is set to sunset at the end of this year). GOP senators initially took issue with the House-passed bill, which hiked the cap to $40,000, but eventually reached a deal that would keep the cap at $40,000 through 2029.
It all came together into a bill that lots of Republican senators – not to mention the entire Democratic caucus – had major qualms with, though only a few of those Republicans actually voted against it.
“This is the most dangerous piece of legislation I’ve ever seen during my time in Congress, Kim said. “It’s also the most far-reaching in many ways, and for it to be done without consideration, without analysis – it’s so reckless, in my opinion.”
Senators Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) opposed the final bill, while Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) only voted for it after securing a number of changes specifically beneficial to Alaska.
Tillis, for his part, came under heavy fire from Trump after he announced he couldn’t support the bill, and announced less than a day later that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2026. That, Kim said, shows just how much power Trump has amassed over a theoretically independent Republican-controlled Congress.
“It shows that the Republican Party is not a real party right now; it’s just captured by this MAGA movement,” Kim said. “It is not separate and equal branches of government; it is about domination by Donald Trump.”
Now that the bill is headed back to the House, New Jersey’s three-member GOP delegation will once again have to weigh in; two of them have had issues in the past with the Senate’s approach, though the final bill may have resolved some of those issues. (New Jersey’s nine Democratic House members all opposed the bill the first time around and are near-certain to do so again.)
Kean, who represents a wealthy and high-tax swing district, was an opponent of changing the SALT deal reached in the House. The eventual Senate bill keeps the $40,000 cap he fought for, but does include a sunset provision in five years that wasn’t in the House version.
And Van Drew has said he won’t support any Medicaid cuts that he believes have too harsh an impact on eligible recipients; whether or not the final Senate bill will pass muster for him remains to be seen.
Republicans have been working towards a July 4 deadline of putting the bill on Trump’s desk, although that could slip if there are enough Republican holdouts in the House. Regardless, Kim said that he intends to put pressure on his Republican House colleagues to sink the bill.
“They have very difficult math over on [the House] side as well,” Kim said. “And we have three members of Congress from New Jersey that voted for this before, and I will do everything I can to try to press them to do so, and if they do, we will hold them accountable for that.”