Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) excoriated Republicans in the early hours of Wednesday during a House Rules Committee hearing on President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which the GOP had conveniently scheduled for 1 a.m.
“This is a farce, an outrageous insult to the people of this country, to bring up a 1,000-page bill at 1 o’clock in the morning,” McGovern said in the hearing. “A bill that’s still being written, by the way, by Republicans, as we speak, in a backroom somewhere, for God’s sake.”
The bill is central to Trump’s domestic agenda: It would extend tax cuts he signed into law in 2017 that are set to expire at the end of this year, and pump hundreds of billions of dollars into his mass deportation campaign and newly announced “Golden Dome” missile defense system.
The legislation would offset those tax cuts and expenditures by pushing millions of Americans off Medicaid, however, and by curbing eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps about 42 million people buy food each month.
“And then to try to jam it through Congress in the middle of the night when nobody is watching is just unbelievably cynical,” McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said Wednesday. “This is why people hate Washington.”
The bill contains a particularly ominous provision that would give the Trump administration new powers to strip nonprofit groups of their tax-exempt status by merely claiming they support terrorism — which has alarmed Americans who cherish their civil liberties.
Republicans voted Sunday to narrowly advance the bill, which they have named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but several GOP holdouts remained and resisted Trump’s demand Tuesday to back it. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Fla.) hopes to push the bill through this week.
McGovern on Wednesday called the legislation “a scam” to punish working and middle-class Americans, asking Republican supporters during the hearing why they chose a career in public service “just to rip away” their constituents’ “health care and food assistance and security.”
“And let me say this to every Republican member who votes for this,” McGovern added.
“You own it,” he continued. “You own it. You own every hospital that closes, every child that goes to bed hungry, every senior who loses care, and every American family forced to choose between groceries and rent, between their heating bill and their child care.”