Vice President Vance and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller are centering their public closing arguments for the “big, beautiful bill” on immigration enforcement — prompting sharp pushback from one GOP holdout.
“Don’t you dare come to me and say this is about border,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is highly critical of the Senate’s changes to the bill and who serves as a barometer for other deficit hawks in the House GOP.
“This is a how-many-trillion-dollar bill, with how much in terms of debt and how many issues at play? You want to come back and tell me it’s about $150 billion border funding?” Roy told me.
Roy’s pushback came as Vance urged Republicans to brush aside concerns about deficits and Medicaid reforms in order to fuel President Trump’s mass deportation agenda with the billions for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), border agents, a border wall and other immigration enforcement priorities.
“Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vance posted on social platform X late Monday night.
Miller went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Monday night to stress the conservative wins in Trump’s tax cut and spending priorities bill.
“This is the most far-reaching border security proposal, Homeland Security proposal in my lifetime. Sean, not just my lifetime, going back to Eisenhower, going back to since we’ve had about the border,” Miller said.
And in an apparent response to House GOP complaints that the Senate parliamentarian stripped out a provision punishing states that give Medicaid benefits to immigrants who entered the country illegally, Miller posted Tuesday on X: “The best way to keep illegal aliens from getting free healthcare is to deport them.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson underscored the immigration messaging in a statement.
“President Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful bill slashes deficits and debt and unleashes economic growth while delivering on another one of the President’s key promises: deport criminal illegal aliens and permanently secure the border,” Jackson said. “While the President has already been extraordinarily successful on these two fronts, the One Big Beautiful Bill is critical to fortify his success and make the progress permanent.”
The public focus on the border and immigration arguments frustrated Roy, who pointed back to the one-or-two debate in January, when Republicans were debating whether to pursue one or two bills to enact Trump’s top legislative priorities through the budget reconciliation process — which allows them to bypass the 60-vote threshold and the need for Democratic votes in the Senate but that can only be used once per fiscal year.
The House Freedom Caucus had pitched a two-step strategy in January, quickly delivering a boost for Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda while addressing the tax cut extension later.
“I would direct them to the memo that we in the Freedom Caucus and conservatives put out,” Roy said. “Here’s the two-bill strategy. We will deliver you a debt ceiling increase. We will deliver you border funding. We will deliver you defense funding, and we want some modest, you know, upfront spending restraint to go along with that. And then let’s go debate tax and spend. And a different choice was made. And so here we are.”
Republicans, at the direction of Trump, ultimately went for the “one big, beautiful bill,” as Trump put it — eventually adopting the moniker as the official title of the legislation.
Trump addressed the multi- versus single-bill debate Tuesday: “Smaller bills would have been easy, but they wouldn’t have been as good.”
Putting all the bill sweeteners together is also useful for GOP leaders trying to push holdouts to support the bill and drag the legislation across the finish line — by making the exact kind of arguments that Vance and Miller are making.
Moderate Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who has expressed concerns about the bill’s Medicaid provisions and rollback of clean energy tax credits, acknowledged as much when I asked him about the arguments about putting concerns aside to advance the border security measures.
“I do think making the tax rates permanent, great plus ups in defense spending and added border security are huge assets to this bill,” Bacon said.
But are they big enough assets to overcome concerns from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum? The holdouts — who have long supported the major Trump agenda items in the bill — do not seem to be swayed by those arguments just yet.
William Martin, communications director to Vance, said in a statement that the vice president “worked tirelessly with Republican leadership and key White House officials to get the One Big Beautiful Bill through the Senate.”
“It was a demonstration to everyone in this party that the entire White House is steadfastly committed to getting this legislation through Congress and on President Trump’s desk before the week is over,” Martin said.
House Republicans are facing an incredibly difficult self-imposed July 4 deadline for final passage after the Senate approved the bill Tuesday — which some Republicans think is not realistic.
Further reading: House conservatives threaten floor revolt over Trump megabill, from my colleague Mychael Schnell.
Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill. Tell me what’s on your radar: ebrooks@thehill.com.
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TRUMP FEUDS BUBBLE UP AND SIMMER DOWN
The public and messy feud between Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk was reignited this week over the president’s “big, beautiful bill,” my colleagues Alex Gangitano and Julia Mueller write.
Musk said Monday he would back primary challengers to any Republicans over the bill that the Congressional Budget Office says will add to the deficit. He promised to donate to lawmakers who have drawn the administration’s ire, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).
Trump in response threatened to cut government contracts for Musk’s companies and left open the possibility of deporting the South African tech CEO.
“I think what’s going to happen is DOGE is going to look at Musk. And if DOGE looks at Musk, we’re going to save a fortune,” Trump said Tuesday, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, the agency Musk led earlier this year.
Not quite as intense as the initial Trump-Musk breakup last month, when Musk accused Trump of being in the “Epstein files.”
But it’s definitely an end to the ceasefire between the two that lasted for a few weeks, when both had signaled they were ready to move on from their initial blow-up.
As the Musk feud bubbled back up to a boil, another one simmered down.
While visiting the new migrant detention center in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” Trump praised his former primary rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), my colleague Julia Manchester reports.
“Ron, I’d like to thank you personally,” Trump told DeSantis at the event. “You’re my friend, you’ll always be my friend, and we may have some skirmishes even in the future, I doubt it, but we’ll always come back because we have blood that seems to match pretty well. We have a relationship that has been a strong one for a very long time, and I appreciate it.”
Quite the far cry from the “DeSanctimonious” nickname that Trump gave the Florida governor during the 2024 primary. And tensions never fully cooled: Not even a month ago, DeSantis’s PAC sent out a pro-DOGE fundraising blast as the Trump-Musk feud broke down, saying that Musk “stood tall and took all the hits.”
MAGA WARMS BACK UP TO ACB
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett landed back in MAGA’s good graces last week, my colleagues Zach Schonfeld and Ella Lee report.
Barrett had faced conservative criticism over her breaks with Trump in rulings earlier this year, causing MAGA online influencers to decry her as a “backstabber” and a “fraud.” And pro-Trump lawyer Mike Davis, a former Senate Judiciary GOP staffer who now runs the Article III Project that has been positioning as an alternative to the conservative Federalist Society, had criticized her for not stoping “activist judges.”
But last week, Barrett led the court’s decision along ideological lines in Trump’s birthright citizenship case limiting lower court use of nationwide injunctions — not only handing Trump a win, but doing so while issuing a full-throated takedown of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary,” Barrett wrote, while citing one of the most basic and foundational Supreme Court cases, Marbury v. Madison.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has criticized Barrett for breaking with Trump, called the exchange an “epic mic drop moment.”
And she got some praise from Trump himself, too.
“I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,” Trump said at an impromptu White House press conference shortly after the opinion was issued.
ON MY CALENDAR
- Friday, July 4: The U.S. celebrates its 249th birthday, and the GOP’s self imposed deadline to deliver the “one big beautiful bill.”
- Friday, July 11, to Sunday, July 13: Turning Point USA hosts its annual Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., with an A-list line up speakers including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon.
- Wednesday, July 16: The Hill hosts a full-day Hill Nation Summit in Washington, D.C. Request to attend here.
- Friday, July 25, to Tuesday, July 29: The Israel on Campus Coalition convenes its national leadership summit in Washington, D.C., estimating 700 student activists and leaders will be in attendance. Speakers include former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and conservative commentators Meghan McCain and Douglas Murray.
THREE MORE THINGS
- NEW PRO-BUSINESS NONPROFIT: The American Growth and Innovation Forum, a 501(c)4 advocacy organization, launched last week with the aim of championing “the role of American innovation, scale and enterprise in driving progress, affordability, and access.” A release noted that many popular arguments “demonize great American companies and work to punish them with onerous regulations.” It noted polling that only 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of big business, but that 87 percent use products from big business. Diana London is the group’s executive director.
- PAGING GROVER NORQUIST: A failed amendment vote in the Senate’s vote-a-rama on the GOP megabill early Tuesday morning put 18 GOP senators on the record in favor of raising taxes on the rich in order to fund relief for rural hospitals. It would have made a new 39.6 percent tax bracket on individuals who make more than $25 million or married couples who make more than $50 million. A senior GOP aide told my colleague Alexander Bolton: “There was a time when Republicans used to have discipline on tax increases. Grover must be pulling his hair out,” referring to the president of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax advocacy group.
- PROUD-ISH TO BE AN AMERICAN: A Gallup survey released Monday found a new record low of adults who are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American: 58 percent. Democrats drove the dip, with only 39 percent saying they were extremely or very proud to be an American, compared to 62 percent last year. The figure was the highest, more than 90 percent, in the years after 9/11.
WHAT I’M READING (AND LISTENING TO)
- “The Daily” podcast from The New York Times: Steve Bannon’s Battle for the Soul of MAGA
- CNN’s Arlette Saenz: Republicans try to make Zohran Mamdani a Democratic villain well outside of New York City
- Associated Press’s Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer: Mystery surrounds the Jeffrey Epstein files after Bondi claims ‘tens of thousands’ of videos
- Tucker Carlson interviews Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: YouTube link