Sen. Padilla chokes up on Senate floor recounting removal from Noem press conference

(WASHINGTON) — Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — a staunch deficit hawk has been critical of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and immigration bill — signaled Monday that he would back the bill when it comes to a vote.

On Saturday Johnson flipped his vote to support a motion to move the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to the Senate floor only after huddling with Republican leaders about further reductions to the federal debt.

CNN’s Jake Tapper prompted Johnson to say he was a yes vote on the bill, to which the senator corrected him, saying he was “a yes on the motion to proceed” and “hopefully” add a provision that would prevent new enrollees in Medicaid expansion states from receiving Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) if they are are not disabled and don’t have dependent children.

Johnson then pivoted to signal his support for the final bill, which will come to a floor vote when an ongoing vote-a-rama wraps up.

“This is about as good as we can get. I don’t like it. I would like to get a lot more. But at some point in time you have to recognize reality. And if we don’t pass this bill, we have a massive $4 trillion tax increase,” Johnson said.

The FMAP amendment, led by fellow conservative holdout Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, had not yet been considered Monday evening.

The Senate plowed ahead toward a final vote on the bill as Republicans rush to get it across the finish line by July 4, with lawmakers voting on amendments through the night into Tuesday morning.

The self-imposed deadline by Trump meant a rare weekend session for lawmakers, one filled with partisan drama and some GOP infighting.

On Monday morning, senators began the “vote-a-rama” — a series of votes on proposed amendments to the megabill.

There is no limit to the number of amendments lawmakers can seek. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the chamber’s top Democrat, promised his party would bring amendment after amendment during the marathon session. Democrats forced a reading of the 940-page bill over the weekend, which took nearly 16 hours.
“Every senator will soon have an opportunity to reject this nonsense and vote for common-sense budgeting. Americans will be watching,” Schumer said on Monday as he slammed Trump’s bill as a break for billionaires that will hurt working-class families.

Democrats used the early hours of the vote-a-rama to force votes highlighting cuts the megabill makes to Medicaid, SNAP and rural hospitals and to hammer Republicans on the tax cuts they say the measure gives to the wealthiest Americans.

The Senate voted down, 47-53, an amendment led by Schumer that he said would have undone “the travesty that is at the core of the Republican bill.”

“Their bill the so-called big beautiful bill, which is really a big, ugly betrayal, cuts taxes for billionaires by taking away health care for millions of people. So what my amendment simply says, if people’s health care costs go up, the billionaire tax cuts vanish,” Schumer said.

Democratic Sen. Ed Markey’s effort to strip provisions that would negatively impact rural hospitals due to cuts to Medicaid also failed, but did receive the support of two Republicans: Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.

The two moderate Republicans, who both have a history of voting across party lines, have raised concerns about how cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would hit their constituents. In total, Murkowski supported five Democratic-led measures in the ongoing vote-a-rama and Collins supported four.

Collins proposed her own amendment that aimed to increase the amount of money in the rural hospital relief fund. It failed by a vote of 22-78, with Collins subsequently criticizing what she called the “hypocritical approach” of the Democrats that voted against it.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture committee, argued that the SNAP provisions in the bill creates “chaos for state budgets and hardship for families” and violate budget rules. Her motion related to SNAP was waived by Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune defended the bill as delivering Trump’s campaign promises to eliminate tax on tips and overtime pay while boosting spending for defense and border security.

“It’s been a long debate,” Thune said in his own floor remarks ahead of the votes on amendments. “I know people are weary. But at the end of the day, we want to get this done so that this country is safer and stronger and more prosperous, not only for today but for future generations of Americans.”

So far, Republicans have defeated all Democratic efforts to modify or reconsider the bill — but the session ran into Tuesday morning.

As he walked off the floor in the early hours of Tuesday, Thune was asked if he could pull the bill back or if he may be forced to hold a final passage vote on the bill, even if he knows it will fail.

“Those are options I don’t want to have to worry about,” Thune replied.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo, a Republican, argued against several of the Democratic amendments.

“The reality is, the reforms we are putting into place are to try to reign in control of wasteful and fraudulent and abusive spending that actually diverts resources away from the people who these programs really deserve to receive,” Crapo said of Schumer’s amendment on Medicaid.

The vote-a-rama is the last hurdle before a vote on final passage of the bill in the Senate.

There is little room for error in the Republican-controlled chamber. A procedural vote on Saturday night to open debate on the bill narrowly passed in a 51-49 vote after two Republican defections.

GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted against advancing the bill. Tillis railed against the changes to Medicaid in the bill, saying it would hurt his constituents and would represent a betrayal of Trump’s promise not to touch the entitlement program upon which millions of people rely for health care coverage.
Tillis’ opposition drew Trump’s ire, with the president threatening to support a primary challenger to the two-term senator. Tillis then suddenly announced he would not seek reelection, saying later he texted Trump on Saturday night suggesting he “probably needed to start looking for a replacement.”

“I respect President Trump. I support the majority of his agenda, but I don’t bow to anybody. When the people of North Carolina are at risk. And this bill puts them at risk,” Tillis said.

As of early Tuesday morning, the GOP leadership were still pushing for sufficient support.

One of the main targets was Murkowski, whose indecision came after reports that the Senate parliamentarian may have ruled some carve out provisions meant for her home state of Alaska’s Medicaid recipients out of order.

Also under pressure were Scott and Sen. Mike Lee, who were yet to receive a vote on their amendment that strips back additional funding for Medicaid. Collins had also not yet said which way she would vote.

Paul, meanwhile, offered an amendment that would significantly reduce the amount of money attributed to raise to the federal debt limit. The current bill raises the debt limit by $5 trillion dollars. Paul’s amendment would raise it by only $500 billion.

What’s next for OBBB in the House?

If the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passes in the Senate, it will have to go back to the House for members to consider the changes made to the bill.

House Republican leaders say Wednesday is the earliest chance for a megabill vote.

“Members are advised that votes are now expected in the House as early as 9 a.m. Wednesday, July 2. Please stay tuned to future updates for additional information regarding this week’s schedule,” a notice from Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s office said.

Speaker Mike Johnson expressed optimism that the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill will pass in the GOP-led House despite opposition from moderates and conservatives.

“We’re going to pass this bill one way or the other,” Johnson said leaving the Capitol Monday evening. “And I have prevailed upon my Senate colleagues to please, please, please, put it as close to the House product as possible. I have been very consistent from the very beginning.

Johnson did not rule out passing the Senate version as is and said, “there’s still a lot of amendments, and a lot of game to play.”

Asked if GOP House leaders would make changes to what the Senate sends over, Johnson said, “We’ll see what the final product is. I am very hopeful as always. We will get this job done. We’ll see what happens.”

The speaker did not respond to a question about passing the bill by the Fourth of July deadline.

Republican leaders have told members they will receive 48 hours notice before a vote is called and will have 72 hours to review the bill text.

The House passed the Trump megabill by just one vote back in May. The Senate version of the bill will face an uphill battle in the House, given the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

California moderate Republican Rep. David Valadao said he will vote no given the Medicaid changes in the Senate bill. Several conservatives, including Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Josh Breechen of Oklahoma and Eric Burlison of Missouri have also expressed opposition to the Senate’s version of the bill.

Johnson and other Republican leaders worked through the weekend to lock down the votes even as several lawmakers have expressed opposition to the Senate’s version, which is still not finalized. Johnson can only afford to lose three defections if all members are voting and present.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump was working “hand in hand” with Johnson and Thune, and that the two leaders had met with him at the White House earlier Monday.

“Republicans need to stay tough and unified during the home stretch, and we are counting on them to get the job done,” Leavitt said during the White House briefing.

But sources familiar with the matter told ABC News Thune and Johnson have not met with President Trump at the White House, and as of now the two leaders have no current plans to meet with the president on Monday as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” progresses in the Senate.

A spokesman for Thune said he is preoccupied as the Senate moves through amendments to the megabill.

“Teams are obviously in close contact/coordination, as always, but we’re continuing to move through vote-a-rama in the Senate as we work to move this bill one step closer to the president’s desk,” the spokesman said in a post on X.

Speaker Johnson is in Washington working through House members’ concerns as the Senate works through the bill, including several provisions that could spell problems later in the week if the bill is sent back to the House.

ABC News’ John Parkinson contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — As top Trump administration officials press for more deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it had deported 142 migrants in the Houston, Texas, area illegally in the United States and convicted of crimes to Mexico, over a two week period.

From May 19 to 30, ICE says the agency removed eight gang members from the United States, 11 convicted individuals who committed crimes against children and a man who entered the U.S. illegally 21 times.

In total, the migrants were convicted of 473 criminal offenses and entered the United States 480 times, according to ICE.

ICE says there were also 30 who were convicted of robbery and grand larceny, 43 who were convicted of aggravated assault and 48 who were convicted of drug crimes they removed.

Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly,” said ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford. “For the past few years, there was virtually no deterrent to illegally entering the country. As a result, millions of illegal aliens poured into the country including violent criminal aliens, child predators, transnational gang members and foreign fugitives.”

Bradford said that “many of these dangerous criminal aliens went on to prey on law-abiding residents in local communities right here in Southeast Texas and we’re laser focused on identifying them and removing them from the country before they harm anyone else. This is just a small snapshot of those efforts as it only focuses on deportations to one country over the course of a two-week period, but it gives you an idea of how big this problem really is.”

It comes as in mid-May, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, was at ICE headquarters alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and urged senior leaders at ICE and Homeland Security Investigations to step up their deportation efforts, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

The meeting was attended by senior ICE leaders and the special agents in charge of Homeland Security Investigations. Border czar Tom Homan was absent from the meeting.

Miller told senior ICE leaders that the Trump administration wants to triple the daily number of arrests agents were making up to 3,000 per day, according to sources.

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(NEW YORK) — The redistricting battle gripping Texas has put a spotlight on the ongoing debate over gerrymandering and its long-term effects on the electorate.

Sam Wang, the founding director of the Electoral Innovation Lab and the creator of the Gerrymandering Project , a research lab focused on creating the most fair district maps, told ABC News that state leaders from both sides of the aisle have changed election boundaries to make it stacked with constituents who vote in their favor.

In the last 20 years, with access to advanced computer algorithms, those gerrymandering attempts have become more egregious as whole counties have been divided up with pinpoint precision, resulting in districts with areas with outlandish shapes, he said.

“Gerrymander is partisanship maximized above all of the other things,” Wang said.

The practice was first identified and coined in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that redrew the state’s congressional maps to benefit the Democratic-Republican party. Maps are typically redrawn at the beginning of each decade to reflect changes in the population from the latest census.

Kareem Crayton, the vice president of the Washington D.C. office of the Brennan Center for Justice, who has spent years researching redistricting, told ABC News the redistricting campaigns since the 2000s have led to a systemic cycle of gerrymandering, especially in the South.

“States like Florida and Texas have the worst examples of gerrymandering,” he said.

But Crayton also pointed out that states with Democratic majorities, like Illinois, have responded with their own maps that also skew districts in their favor, leading to an endless cycle.

“All of these states are looking around at each other like ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ thinking who’s going to fire first,” he said, referring to the Western film. “There is no sheriff in town saying this is not helping everyone.”

While Republican and Democratic leaders in those states have contended they are redrawing their maps to adequately reflect their communities, Wang said the math and geography aren’t backing their arguments.

Wang’s lab created a mathematical algorithm that creates district maps using key demographic factors. Racial demographics from the Census, environmental and geographic information from local data and other public sources are used to create district maps that remove political bias. Those maps are then compared to the district maps currently in place.

“That tells us what someone who didn’t care about political parties would do,” he explained. “We have harnessed the power of computer simulation to see what would be neutral.”

Texas is one of the 15 states in the map that earned an F grade based on the Gerrymander Project’s formula.

Although the state legislature and congressional delegation are led by a Republican majority, Texas’s current districting map is divided in a way that gives the GOP an advantage, according to the project. The analysis shows that the redistricting negates a challenging vote.

Travis County, for example, includes the city of Austin, which has leaned Democratic, but the county includes five congressional districts around it. By not including Austin in the suburban areas, the congressional district will lean Republican, according to the analysis.

The Gerrymander Project’s analysis found that the county splits in Texas, which is the number of districts within a single county, are higher than the average split per state, based on its analysis.

For example, more dense Dallas County is home to five congressional districts, and two of the districts’ boundaries extend into the next county.

Such division leads to confusion among voters as to what their district is, according to Crayton.

Crayton said that such county splits have led to more examples of elected officials running unopposed.

“If you’re a candidate from an opposing party, you’re going to have an uphill battle trying to run in a district where the majority of the voters are registered to the majority,” he said.

“We’ve seen it happen all of the time where a Democrat or Republican simply won’t put the time and effort to run because the gerrymandered district puts the odds against them,” Crayton said.

Although the majority of the states that got the project’s F grade are in the South and show more of a Republican advantage, the experts warned that blue states in other parts of the country have used gerrymandering as well.

Illinois, which is one of the Midwest states with an F grade, is the prime example, they said.

Its current map, which was adopted in 2021, contains non-compact districts, which leads to unequal voter density per area, and more county splits than the average, according to the Gerrymander Project.

One egregious example is the state’s 13th congressional district, which covers a nearly 2,300 square mile boundary that extends from its southern point near the border with Missouri to Springfield, right in the center of the state, and then east to the city of Champaign.

The boundaries keep a huge concentration of Democratic leaning voters, according to the Gerrymander Project.

Wang noted that the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision that ruled gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court has removed key guardrails for preventing states from taking part in severe party redistricting.

The case involved gerrymandering allegations in North Carolina, and while the court’s majority ruled that the practice may be “incompatible with democratic principles,” federal courts had no jurisdiction in reviewing those cases.

Wang said that most states have taken gerrymandering to their limit and made it extremely hard for state legislatures to revert their boundaries to more fair areas.

“The lemon has been squeezed dry,” he said.

However, Wang noted that gerrymandering cases have prompted the public to speak out and take action to turn the tide and rein in gerrymandering in some key states.

Virginia, for example, used a special master in 2022 to draw up its current maps following a court case brought by the state’s constituents and some local elected officials.

The court ordered the special master to create district maps to adhere to federal requirements of population equality, the Voting Rights Act mandates, state constitution and statutes in its districting process.

As a result of its changes, the state, which has a slight Democratic majority in its state legislature, has no partisan competitiveness in its congressional districts, according to the Gerrymander Project, which awarded Virigina an A rating.

The district’s geography is “Fairly compact” and has the national average number of county splits, according to the project’s analysis.

Wang said ballot initiatives that removed the legislature from the districting process have risen in popularity in many states and have made a huge difference.

Arizona, which also has an A rating by the project, has been using an independent redistricting commission after voters passed a ballot initiative in 2000 that changed state regulations.

The state, which has a Republican majority in its state legislature, does not have a partisan advantage in its state districts, according to the Gerrymandering Project. Its districts are seen as “fairly compact” and are the average number of county splits, according to the analysis.

Crayton and Wang said the state-run solutions to redistricting are a good step forward, but ultimately, it is going to take Congressional legislation to end partisan influence in these maps.

Wang said that public opinion has consistently shown that constituents seek fair maps regardless of their political affiliations.

“If Congress were to really pursue it, it could be bipartisan and get a lot of support,” he said of legislation that prohibited gerrymandering tactics. “And we’ve seen it work.”

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