Trump Administration News: Senate Republicans Overcome 3 Holdouts to Send Signature Policy Bill to House (Published 2025)

The Biden administration had extended those protections for Haitians through Feb. 3, 2026. Judge Cogan wrote that Ms. Noem would have to wait until then to decide not to renew the protections for Haitians according to what he called “the statutorily prescribed procedures Congress has enacted.”

Judge Cogan’s ruling was a setback for the administration’s effort to revoke protections for migrants fleeing from some of the world’s most unstable and dangerous places to fulfill a campaign pledge by President Trump, who vilified Haitians in a debate with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and singled them out as deportation targets several times.

Hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who had been authorized to remain in the country, including Afghans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, also face deportation.

The Obama administration first granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the United States in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake. The program had been repeatedly extended until the Trump administration moved to cancel the designation in 2017.

Civil liberties groups sued to block the measure. A federal appeals court ultimately allowed the administration’s move to go forward, but the Biden administration withdrew the order before the designation for Haiti expired on March 5, 2021.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, plunged into government collapse and criminal anarchy after the assassination of the country’s president in 2021.

The country is now overrun by gangs who control much of the capital and countryside. The State Department places Haiti at the highest threat level in its travel advisory database, citing widespread violent crime and advising Americans not to visit.

But even before the current crisis, Haiti and migrants from the country — who are overwhelmingly Black — have been the focus of Mr. Trump’s vitriol. In 2021, Mr. Trump said that Haitian migrants were spreading AIDS to the United States, saying “it’s like a death wish for our country.” He also referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country in remarks denigrating Haitian immigrants.

Mr. Trump has been pressing Israel and Hamas to end their nearly two-year-old war. The announcement, which the president made on Truth Social, his social media site, comes ahead of a meeting Mr. Trump is scheduled to have with Mr. Netanyahu in Washington next week.

Mr. Trump said his representatives had a “long and productive meeting with the Israelis today on Gaza,” and if the cease-fire is agreed upon, there would be talks about a permanent end to the conflict in Gaza. He said the proposal backed by the United States and Israel would be delivered to Hamas by Qatar and Egypt, countries that have long served as mediators for the Palestinian militant group in its indirect negotiations with Israel over an end to the war in Gaza.

“I hope, for the good of the Middle East, that Hamas takes this Deal, because it will not get better — IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Just last week, Mr. Trump announced a cease-fire agreement on social media, between Israel and Iran. Days earlier, the United States had joined an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear sites.

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to fight Hamas until it is defeated. But he is facing increasing pressure at home to end the conflict by agreeing to a cease-fire deal that would see Hamas release the remaining hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the war in Gaza. As many as 20 captives are believed to still be alive, and the remains of about 30 others are still in the enclave.

Mr. Trump on Sunday publicly pressed for a deal. “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!” he wrote on social media.

That day, Mr. Netanyahu told a group at the Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, that Israel’s campaign targeting nuclear sites in Iran had “opened up many opportunities, first among them to rescue the hostages.” Israel still must “resolve the Gaza issue and defeat Hamas,” he said, adding, “I believe that we will succeed in both these missions.”

Some analysts have speculated that Mr. Netanyahu may now be willing to agree to end the war in Gaza, even if it risks far-right political allies leaving his governing coalition.

Mr. Trump has pressed for a cease-fire agreement in Gaza since before he took office in January, and a phased truce did go into effect that month. The accord, which was supposed to be negotiated in stages, collapsed in March, and Israel resumed fighting with Hamas. Negotiations have been at an impasse since.

Israel has previously accepted versions of a proposal put forward by Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy, which calls for a roughly two-month cease-fire and the release of about half the living hostages, along with the remains of some others. Talks for a permanent cease-fire would take place during that period.

But longstanding obstacles appear to be unresolved. Hamas has said it will only release all the remaining Israeli hostages if Israel’s military fully withdraws from Gaza and there is a guaranteed end to the war. Israel, for its part, has insisted that Hamas must surrender, disarm and send its leaders in Gaza into exile.

Israel and Hamas are facing pressure from the international community to end the deadly conflict that has displaced the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza, often repeatedly, and caused widespread privation and hunger. Israel imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza after fighting with Hamas resumed in March, for about 80 days, raising alarms from international health organizations as supplies in the enclave dwindled, worsening the hunger crisis.

The ministry of health in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, says that more than 56,000 people have been killed and more than 134,000 have been wounded since the fighting began.

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

The judge’s opinion barred various administration officials from enforcing directives handed down this year to gut the foundation, at least temporarily restoring its independence. The foundation provides direct grants and assistance to African-owned grassroots enterprises.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the case hinged on the control that Pete Marocco, a former State Department official, took over the agency at Mr. Trump’s behest earlier this year.

Shortly after the president appointed Mr. Marocco chairman of the foundation’s board, without Senate confirmation and over the objections of its leadership, Mr. Marocco carried out what was in effect a hostile takeover.

After a standoff in March in which the foundation’s staff tried to physically keep him out, Mr. Marocco entered the agency’s headquarters escorted by federal marshals, changed the locks and cut its staff and programs to the minimum required by law.

Judge Leon wrote that everything that followed at the foundation, from mass layoffs to bulk grant cancellations recommended by DOGE analysts, resulted from the original unlawful act of placing Mr. Marocco in charge.

“All these violations flow from the president’s appointment of Marocco as an acting member of USADF’s board of directors,” Judge Leon wrote.

In June, Judge Leon also presided over a lawsuit brought by a foundation board member appointed by colleagues to be the group’s president at the time Mr. Trump installed Mr. Marocco. He ruled in that case that the Trump administration technically had the power to remove the official from the board.

But the judge found that neither Mr. Marocco nor DOGE lieutenants could lawfully call the shots at the agency either, though his order did not bar the Trump administration from eventually pursuing the same goals with another leader approved by Congress.

Groups behind the lawsuit celebrated the ruling as returning some control to the foundation. “This is a victory for the rule of law and the communities that rely on U.S.A.D.F.’s vital work,” said Joel McElvain, a senior legal adviser at Democracy Forward, which helped lead the suit. “No president can erase a federal agency, ignore Congress, and upend lives without legal authority.”

Judge Leon stressed that the contractor who helped in filing the lawsuit, Rural Development Innovations, had been wholly dependent upon the agency for funding, and thus faced bankruptcy and closure because of the cutbacks at the foundation.

The path is steep: Multiple members who voted to pass the House version criticized what emerged from the upper chamber, and Mr. Johnson can lose fewer than a handful if all members vote. When the House first voted on the measure in late May, two Republicans, Representatives Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — both anti-deficit conservatives — joined all Democrats in voting against it.

“The changes the Senate made to the House-passed Beautiful Bill, including unacceptable increases to the national debt and the deficit, are going to make passage in the House difficult,” Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, wrote Tuesday in a social media post.

He did not say whether the changes would affect his vote, but he did express a willingness to do away with the arbitrary July 4 deadline set by Mr. Trump to seek improvements to the bill. “We cannot in good faith pass a bill through our chamber that hinges on cut corners and earmarks,” Mr. Stutzman wrote. “The American people won’t stand for it.”

Other members of his party were less circumspect.

“No,” Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, repeated when reporters asked if he would vote for the bill as he did before.

“No,” he said again when asked if he would cast a procedural vote to allow the bill to make it to the floor.

“What we ought to do is take exactly the House bill that we sent over and go home and say ‘when you’re serious, come back,’” he added, before entering the committee room where House deliberations on the bill began shortly after it passed the Senate.

There were other immediate signs the Senate-passed bill had a tough path ahead.

Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee called it a “dud” that “guts key Trump provisions.” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said the Senate’s treatment of clean energy tax credits were not aggressive enough and called it “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”

More moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans repeated their opposition to its cuts to Medicaid.

“I’ve been clear from the start that I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid,” Representative David Valadao, Republican of California, said in a social media post over the weekend. He argued that the version passed by the House made “reasonable” changes to the program but warned that his support would be lost if deeper cuts were made in the Senate.

Senate Republicans did just that, planning to help offset tax cuts and new spending with steeper cuts to Medicaid, tens of billions of dollars more than the House plan.

Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, predicted that there was enough opposition to delay passage by the end of the week and predicted that the two chambers would trade modifications before the bill would be ready for Mr. Trump’s signature.

“The bottom line is this is not ready for prime time. We support the president’s agenda. The president’s agenda was not to raise the deficit by three-quarters of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years,” Mr. Harris, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview on Fox News. “The bottom line is the House will have its say, and this will not sail through the House. We’re going to have to negotiate with the Senate one more time.”

The groundswell of opposition among House Republicans was familiar. When they first passed their version of the reconciliation package in late May, a number of Republicans publicly opposed the bill, but, after lengthy deal-making sessions and some concessions from party leaders, most critics caved.

As was the case in the Senate, Republicans in the House can afford only three defections, if all members are voting and present. The immovable Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has already vowed to vote against it again.

Last time around, Mr. Trump was actively engaged to whip votes in favor, calling individual House members and traveling to Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, he renewed calls for his party to deliver results by his July 4 deadline.

“We can have all of this right now, but only if the House GOP UNITES, ignores its occasional ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ (You know who you are!), and does the right thing, which is sending this Bill to my desk,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media account Tuesday afternoon.

Representative Warren Davidson, the Ohio Republican who voted against the House version in May, signaled that his concerns over spending had not been soothed after seeing changes made to the bill in the Senate.

“Promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending,” Mr. Davidson said in a social media post on Tuesday. “We will eventually arrive at the crash site, because it appears nothing will stop this runaway spending train. A fatal overdose of government.”

Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

Mr. Trump’s attack on the mayoral candidate echoed language he has long used to lend credibility to falsehoods. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” he said of Mr. Mamdani. “We’re going to look at everything.”

When a journalist raised the possibility that Mr. Mamdani “will not allow” ICE to make immigration arrests, Mr. Trump replied, “Well then we’ll have to arrest him.”

“The president of the United States just threatened to have me arrested,” Mr. Mamdani said in a response on social media, adding that Mr. Trump’s statements “don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: If you speak up, they will come for you.”

He continued, “We will not accept this intimidation.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has so far declined to endorse Mr. Mamdani, rallied behind him after Mr. Trump’s attacks.

“I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States,” Ms. Hochul wrote on social media. “If you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers — starting with me.”

The attack was the latest effort by Mr. Trump to promote far-fetched conspiracy theories about his political opponents: He used a similar attack to falsely accuse Nikki Haley, his rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, of not being eligible for the presidency. Later that year, he falsely questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s identity as a Black woman.

And Mr. Trump’s attack against Mr. Mamdani echoed the lie that raised his profile in the Republican Party ahead of his 2016 run for president: that President Barack Obama was not legitimately elected because he was not born in the United States.

Mr. Mamdani, who ran a spirited, disciplined campaign that focused on the cost of living, has been targeted by Republicans who have painted him as a boogeyman of far-left politics. They have highlighted his age and criticism of Israel and — in some instances — denigrated his religion.

Representative Andy Ogles, a hard-right Tennessee Republican, used Islamophobic language to attack Mr. Mamdani on social media last week and called for him to be deported. Other Republican lawmakers made similar attacks.

During a news conference on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, laughed when asked about Mr. Ogles’s calls for deportation and whether Mr. Trump supported them.

“I haven’t heard him say that,” she said. “I haven’t heard him call for that, but certainly he does not want this individual to be elected.”

Ms. Habba has bucked the traditionally nonpartisan approach of U.S. attorneys. She has aggressively carried out Mr. Trump’s wish to use the Justice Department to target his enemies, including Democratic elected officials who oppose the president’s immigration agenda.

“We could turn New Jersey red. I really do believe that,” Ms. Habba said in an interview with a conservative podcast host after her appointment. “Hopefully while I’m there, I can help that cause.”

She has directed the government’s lawyers to investigate Philip D. Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, and the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, over the state’s immigration policies.

In May, Ms. Habba’s office brought criminal trespassing charges against Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, after he was arrested outside an immigration detention facility. Her office has also charged Representative LaMonica McIver, who was also present at the facility when Mr. Baraka was arrested, with assault.

The charges against Mr. Baraka were later dropped, and Ms. Habba’s office earned a rare admonition from a federal magistrate judge.

“Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas,” Judge André M. Espinosa told prosecutors.

In June, Mr. Baraka sued Ms. Habba over his arrest, arguing that it was politically motivated and that Ms. Habba had defamed him. Addressing Mr. Baraka last month, Ms. Habba wrote on social media: “My advice to the mayor - feel free to join me in prioritizing violent crime and public safety. Far better use of time for the great citizens of New Jersey.”

Ms. Habba, the daughter of Catholic Iraqi immigrants who fled religious persecution, had no prosecutorial experience before her appointment this year, and had previously overseen a small civil litigation firm.

After meeting Mr. Trump through his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, she started working for him in 2021 as a legal representative, filing a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and Mr. Trump’s niece, claiming they were plotting to gain access to his tax records. A judge later dismissed the suit.

She then helped lead Mr. Trump’s legal defense in a defamation suit filed by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who had accused Mr. Trump of raping her decades earlier; the jury found in favor of Ms. Carroll, and Mr. Trump was ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages. Ms. Habba also represented Mr. Trump in a case brought by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who accused him of having falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars; the judge in that case imposed a penalty of more than $450 million. Mr. Trump is appealing both cases.

The U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey employs about 150 federal prosecutors. Conservatives like the Supreme Court justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie have previously led the office.

Ms. Habba must be confirmed by the Senate by the end of July. Her nomination could be blocked by New Jersey’s Democratic senators, as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York has done for Mr. Trump’s nominees for that state’s top U.S. attorney offices.

The judges of New Jersey’s federal court also could appoint her to fill the role until she or another nominee is confirmed by the Senate.

Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim of New Jersey said that Ms. Habba “does not meet the standard” to become a U.S. attorney, and they criticized her performance in the three months she has held the job.

The people of New Jersey, the senators said in a statement, deserve a top prosecutor who has “deep experience with law enforcement, a reputation and an approach that puts partisanship to the side and who will work to keep our communities safe and impartially pursue justice.”

“In her short tenure as an interim U.S. attorney,” they added, “she has degraded the office and pursued frivolous and politically motivated prosecutions.”

Ms. Habba could not be immediately reached for comment.

Tracey Tully contributed reporting.

CNN said the article was a straightforward report on the existence of the app, called ICEBlock.

“This is an app that is publicly available to any iPhone user who wants to download it,” the network said in a statement. “There is nothing illegal about reporting the existence of this or any other app, nor does such reporting constitute promotion or other endorsement of the app by CNN.”

Allies of Mr. Trump, including the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, have criticized CNN after the online article was published on Monday.

Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to sue CNN and The New York Times for publishing articles about a preliminary intelligence report on the American attack on Iran, the conclusions of which ran counter to the president’s assertion that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.”

“The executive branch does not have the authority to order, organize or implement wholesale changes to the structure and function of the agencies created by Congress,” she wrote.

A coalition of 19 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia had banded together in a lawsuit led by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, seeking to reverse Mr. Kennedy’s plan to cut 10,000 federal health workers after mass layoffs began in April. The lawsuit also challenged his reorganization of the sprawling department, which included paring down 28 federal divisions to 15.

The layoffs and restructuring effectively eliminated programs that assisted local officials with a variety of public health issues ranging from testing for sexually transmitted diseases to anti-smoking campaigns to lead-poisoning outbreaks, the states contended, resulting in the loss of critical services almost overnight.

In her order, Judge DuBose, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., laid out a withering civics lesson, offering the government “a brief reminder about the bedrock doctrine of separation of powers that governs the relationship between the United States.” She added that the changes at the agency would have knock-on effects for the entire country, and that the Constitution expressly prevented someone in Mr. Kennedy’s position from attempting such a “concentration of power in one part of the government.”

In recent testimony to Congress, Mr. Kennedy said that more than 700 staff members from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had been let go had since been brought back. It is unclear how many of the public health gaps described by states in the litigation remain unaddressed.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, said on Tuesday that the agency stood by its “decision to realign this organization with its core mission and refocus a sprawling bureaucracy that, over time, had become wasteful, inefficient and resistant to change.”

He said the reorganization was meant to help the department reverse chronic disease and advance U.S. leadership in biomedical research. The agency is reviewing the court’s decision and considering next steps, he added.

Ms. James applauded the judge’s order as relief, however temporary, for “our most vulnerable communities.”

“H.H.S. is the backbone of our nation’s public health and social safety net — from cancer screenings and maternal health to early childhood education and domestic violence prevention,” she said in a statement. “Today’s order guarantees these programs and services will remain accessible and halts the administration’s attempt to sabotage our nation’s health care system.”

Shortly after taking office, President Trump ordered nearly every agency to undergo a drastic overhaul and present plans for large-scale layoffs.

During a court hearing in May, Molly Thomas-Jensen, an attorney with the New York Attorney General’s Office, outlined some of the services that were cut as a result of Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to follow that directive, including screening for hearing loss in newborns, tracking of maternal mortality and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

“Secretary Kennedy has admitted that performing a careful review of job responsibilities before laying off 10,000 employees would have taken too long and would have resulted in a loss of political momentum,” Ms. Thomas-Jensen said. “He also conceded that he believed that 20 percent of these layoffs would be mistakes, and that that was always the plan.”

Elizabeth Hedges, a lawyer for the Justice Department, argued that the agency was working within its discretion to get rid of redundant functions.

“As an executive agency, it has to have some authority to order its affairs,” Ms. Hedges said.

She said many of the harms that states outlined were hypothetical and not imminent. She also argued that the changes to the department were not finalized, and therefore could not be challenged yet.

State and federal officials submitted declarations describing the effect of the cuts that were evident in May.

A Wisconsin official said that leaders of Milwaukee Public Schools discovered flaking lead paint and lead dust in school buildings — and children with elevated blood-lead levels. When they turned to the C.D.C. for help, the agency “declined the request due to the April 1 staff cuts,” the declaration said.

Other states also detailed the shuttering of the C.D.C.’s lead-exposure assistance unit, which has since been reinstated.

In Michigan, officials said they relied on specialists from the C.D.C. to inspect a renovated public health lab so that it could restart operations. It was still waiting for a response from the agency several weeks later, according to a declaration by Elizabeth Hertel, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Several states said they relied on the C.D.C. to fund help lines that people could call if they wanted support for quitting smoking, but that they got notice that their funding would end in the fall.

In Michigan, the grant covered 11 staff positions and their $1.3 million Quitlink program, which provides help to those seeking to stop smoking, a declaration said.

State officials in New York and Virginia said they already had to lay off about a dozen tobacco control workers each and pared back services, including support on the help lines. In West Virginia, high school students bemoaned the loss of a small anti-vaping program that gave them a chance to educate lawmakers in Charleston about policies that could help their school.

For weeks, Ms. Murkowski, the moderate fourth-term senator who has criticized Mr. Trump and has long been a swing vote in her party, had expressed concerns about the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food assistance contained in the bill. It would impose strict new work requirements for both programs and reduce the federal contribution to their costs.

But with Mr. Trump demanding quick action and Republicans facing a tight vote margin in the Senate, Ms. Murkowski wielded unique leverage with party leaders to insist on changes. Republicans stuffed the bill with all sorts of goodies designed to win her over, including a provision that would allow certain Alaskan whaling captains to deduct more of their expenses.

Some viewed the backroom dealing as the work of a savvy and experienced lawmaker fighting for her constituents. But critics castigated Ms. Murkowski, saying she had besmirched herself by taking a bribe from Republican leaders to secure her vote for a bill that she, herself, said was dangerous for the vast majority of the country.

“Republicans are working Sen. Murkowski to create whatever Kodiak Kickback she needs to vote for this dangerous bill,” Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, wrote on social media.

To make things worse, Democrats said, one of the carve outs she won to protect Alaskans would create a perverse incentive to reward bad actors across the country in administering SNAP benefits.

One of Ms. Murkowski’s major concerns was that Alaska’s high error rate in paying SNAP benefits would result in her state having to shoulder an uncommonly high share of the program’s costs. First, Republicans tried to exempt Alaska from the provision by carving out “noncontiguous states.”

But when the Senate parliamentarian, the official who enforces the chamber’s rules, said the bill could not allow such a special exception, party leaders had to find a different way to protect Alaska. They settled on giving a two-year exemption to states with the highest rates of either overpaying or underpaying SNAP benefits, effectively shielding 10 other states that also made frequent mistakes from having to pay higher costs.

“The only way of getting past the rule was to expand the graft,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee that oversees the program, said.

“A state that’s doing a good job — they’re going to have to get these cuts,” she said. The message of the Republican-written bill, she argued, was: “Raise your error rates — get them up to 10, 20, 30, 40 percent! Make a whole bunch of mistakes when it comes to SNAP, because then you’ll get more money.”

For days, Ms. Murkowski had mulled what to do. She spent much of an overnight session ahead of its passage huddled with various colleagues on and off the Senate floor — sometimes with a thick blanket slung across her shoulders against the frigid temperatures in the chamber — trying to decide where she would come down on the bill. After the vote, Ms. Murkowski continued to express grave concerns about the legislation she had supported.

“Agonizing,” she said when asked to describe the process of getting to “yes” on the bill. She said that ultimately she supported an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year, and killing the bill would also have had a harmful impact on the people in her state.

“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country when you look to the Medicaid and the SNAP provisions,” she said.

“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” she added. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Republicans had backed a bill that they knew was problematic because they were afraid of Mr. Trump.

And he singled out Ms. Murkowski for derision without naming her, quoting a comment she made in April at a conference in Anchorage, about how G.O.P. lawmakers fear crossing Mr. Trump.

“They voted in obeisance to Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies,” Mr. Schumer said. “Because, as one of the senators said, ‘We are all afraid.’”

Mr. Schumer also credited Democrats with removing one of the sweeteners on Medicaid that Senate Republicans had added to the bill to win over Ms. Murkowski. He called the provision a “polar payoff,” adding, “it should not have stood — and it didn’t.”

As the bill made its way back to the House on Tuesday to face an uncertain fate, Democrats were using Ms. Murkowski’s words to make their case against it.

“Listen to this quote from Murkowski, who just caved and voted for this,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said as the Rules Committee debated the legislation.

He then quoted her urging the House to improve the bill, adding: “If you really believe that, why the hell did you vote for the bill?”

It took an extraordinary all-night session and some last-minute sweeteners for the final holdout for Republican leaders to drag the bill to passage, an effort that underscored the deep unease about the legislation. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who was a final holdout and backed it only after securing protections for her constituents from its most painful cuts, called the process “agonizing.”

Now, the G.O.P. must sell its widely criticized plan to a public that polls show is already skeptical of the legislation. And it will have to do so over the harsh condemnation of Democrats, who intend to make attacks on the measure a centerpiece of their 2026 campaign to retake the House and Senate.

The long-term fiscal consequences of the measure may be even more damaging. In the messy process of jamming the bill through the closely divided Senate, Republicans shattered a longstanding budgeting convention meant to curb Congress’s ability to enact policies that swell the deficit in the long term. With that guardrail busted, the nation’s already soaring debt is at risk of increasing exponentially over time, a dubious legacy for Republicans, who often call themselves the party of fiscal responsibility.

Some of the most lacerating criticism of the legislation came from within the Republican ranks, notably from Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. He had been warning his party for days that the bill was a political loser even before he abruptly announced on Sunday he would retire from the Senate next year after coming under political assault from Mr. Trump over his opposition to the bill.

Mr. Tillis said his research showed that the Medicaid cuts in the bill would wreak havoc in his state. In a biting floor speech that had to hit fellow Republicans where it hurt, he compared their promises that no deserving Medicaid recipient would lose coverage to a memorable Obama-era refrain that Republicans deployed to tremendous success against Democrats and relish to this day.

“The last time I saw a promise broken around health care,” Mr. Tillis said, “is when somebody said, ‘If you like your health care, you can keep it; if you like your doctor, you can keep it,’” Mr. Tillis said. “We found that wasn’t true.”

The pointed reference was, of course, to President Barack Obama’s pledge in 2009 that under his new health care plan, Americans would not experience any disruption in their coverage, a claim that did not pan out, contributing to big Democratic losses in the 2010 midterm elections.

Republicans made comments in this case that might come back to sting them. Vice President JD Vance dismissed as “immaterial” on Monday the Medicaid cuts that could reach millions of Americans when measured against the new security spending in the bill. Under fire at home for her support of the bill, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, answered constituent fears about potential loss of health care access by saying, “We are all going to die.”

As they pushed their legislation, top Republicans insisted that Medicaid would still be available to those who truly should be receiving it — that they were simply stomping out waste, fraud and abuse and knocking able-bodied Americans who could and should work out of the program.

“Medicaid was originally intended for children and poor families, children and people who were disabled and couldn’t work to provide health care,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Budget Committee. “Count me in for that.”

The rub for Republicans is that with generous federal support, many states have greatly extended the reach of their public health insurance programs deep into the ranks of Americans holding down jobs that do not provide health coverage. The states and their residents have come to rely on Medicaid as a stable source of health care. History has shown that once voters obtain government aid under a program, they are not happy to see those benefits threatened, particularly if they are told that it is being done to underwrite tax cuts for affluent Americans.

Republicans also came under fire from within their ranks over the bill’s expected impact on the national debt. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has for weeks taken aim at his G.O.P. colleagues for abandoning their professed anti-deficit ideology by promoting legislation that spills barrels of red ink while raising the federal debt limit by $5 trillion.

Mr. Paul warned colleagues who like to consider themselves deficit hawks that they would have no one to point fingers at when the bill comes due if the measure becomes law and the projections are realized.

“Republicans now own the debt, and Republicans now own the spending,” Mr. Paul said. “There is no more blaming — ‘Oh, it’s Biden’s fault.’ The deficit is fully, completely owned by Republicans.”

Top Republicans dispute the claims that their measure will drive up the deficit and say that the growth produced by the legislation will offset any revenue losses, a prediction that has proved to be overly optimistic under past Republican-only tax cuts.

“We want to grow the economy,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said of his party’s legislation, in an appearance on Fox News. “They want to grow the government,” he said of the Democrats.

The Senate Republican projections of the fiscal impact of their legislation were enhanced by a bit of dexterous accounting that allowed them to unilaterally treat the cost of extending the tax breaks as zero in a maneuver that Democrats said perverted special Senate budget rules and undermined the filibuster.

Democrats said that approach would come back to haunt Republicans when Democrats regain control of Congress and use the same tactic to push through legislation Republicans oppose without the threat of a filibuster.

To try to soften the political impact of the health care changes, Republicans pushed off most of the start dates of the program cuts and new work requirements for Medicaid recipients past the 2026 midterm elections.

But Democrats intend to pound home the looming consequences of the cuts, and they may get some help from Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. Though he voted for the legislation, Mr. Hawley said he was so opposed to the Medicaid provisions that he intended to spend the next two years trying to get them overturned.

It is worth noting that Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterms even though the botched rollout out of the Affordable Care Act was years away as Republicans capitalized on voter anxiety about the coming health care changes.

Mr. Tillis reminded his colleagues of that fact and the impact on his own political career in North Carolina and Washington.

“That made me the second Republican speaker of the House since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people,” he said about becoming head of the House in his home state after the tumult surrounding the Affordable Care Act. “Three years later, it actually made me a U.S. senator.”