House Republicans voted early Thursday morning to pass Pres. Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a lengthy omnibus measure that includes a wide range of various policy changes.
The vote was cleanly drawn on party lines: Hawai‘i's representatives, Ed Case and Jill Tokuda, joined every other House Democrat to vote against the measure, while all but one Republican voted in support, with three other Republican abstentions. The final vote was 215-214.
Opponents of the bill have pointed particularly at its projected impacts upon citizens’ health care, food stamps, and tax burden.
Case told Aloha State Daily via email he voted against the bill “because it provides huge tax breaks to those who least need it, devastates Medicaid, SNAP supplemental nutrition assistance and other bedrock safety nets for those in the most need, increases our national debt by trillions of dollars, reverses decades of sound energy policy, and hides various special interest giveaways in its thousand pages.”
The 1,118-page bill opens with a range of changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food stamp program. Those changes largely restrict who is eligible for SNAP benefits: currently, parents or household members responsible for a dependent child under the age of 18 are exempt from work requirements to receive SNAP.
The Big Beautiful Bill shrinks that margin to apply only to guardians of children under the age of seven.
Similarly, current law exempts people older than 55 from SNAP’s work requirements. The Big Beautiful Bill pushes back that exemption date until a person is 65.
The bill also substantially curtails the degree to which states can apply their own exemptions to SNAP eligibility requirements, and eliminates statutes extending SNAP eligibility to refugees.
On the healthcare front, the bill would slash Medicaid spending by nearly $700 billion. It also requires Medicaid beneficiaries to have full-time employment to qualify and prohibits federal Medicaid payment to nonprofit healthcare providers that provide family planning services in low-income areas.
Certain tax credits introduced in 2017 would become permanent, including a doubling of the maximum child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000.
A statement from Tokuda’s office estimated that the bill, if passed, will cause 13.7 million Americans to lose access to health care, 3 million a year will lose SNAP benefits, and people making less than $50,000 per year will receive an annual tax benefit of only about $265.
“Americans will go hungry because of this bill,” Tokuda said Thursday. “Americans will die without the health care that Republicans are ripping away from them. And Republicans who have spent decades railing about ‘fiscal responsibility’, have betrayed the American people, forcing our keiki to shoulder the long-term costs of these tax cuts. I will not give up and will continue fighting against this agenda to protect our working families and our future.”
On the other hand, the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means published data suggesting that the average Honolulu taxpayer would see a 19% tax increase if Trump's 2017 tax credits are not made permanent, while more than 80,000 families would have their child tax credit halved. More than 5,000 Honolulu small businesses would also see a 43.4% tax rate if not for the bill, according to a Ways and Means committee fact sheet.
Other parts of the bill would provide upwards of $46 billion to construct a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and impose a $1,000 fee on migrants seeking asylum.
The bill also allocates about $150 billion for military spending, including about $11.1 billion to improve the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawai‘i.
The bill will now go before the Senate for further deliberation. Republican leaders have signaled their intention to pass the bill by July 4.
Aloha State Daily reached out to the Hawai‘i Republican Party for comment.
