Today, July 3rd, was a very interesting day to be monitoring American politics from Europe.

When I woke up in Croatia at 7am local time (1am in D.C.) and checked my phone. I learned that the House was in the middle of a very elongated process to vote on a motion to proceed with debate of the Senate version of OBBBA. At that particular point in time, there were 5 Republicans who had already voted “nay” to the motion, which would have been enough to kill it; but Speaker Johnson kept the vote open for close to 6 hours. A couple of hours after I’d woken up, that motion would pass, 219-213.

(That was actually the second several-hour-long vote of the day; a previous vote to make some technical amendments to the rules around the debate took more than 7 hours, making it the longest vote in the history of the U.S. House. Keep in mind that these types of House votes normally last 15 minutes.)

Shortly after that, a few minutes before 5am D.C. time, the debate started on the Senate version of OBBBA itself. At this point Minority Leader Jeffries took it on himself to do a bit of a filibuster, breaking the House record for longest speech by talking continuously for 8 hours. And this is immediately after the House had already pulled an all-nighter.

With all that, we were finishing off our dinner in Croatia and getting ready to order dessert when the news came through that the House had passed the Senate version of OBBBA without any amendments, 218-214. In the end the only two Republicans who refused to vote for the bill did so for opposite reasons: Massie of Kentucky is the keenest of deficit hawks and had voted against the original bill; while Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a moderate who represents a suburban Philadelphia district that Harris won in 2024, disliked the changes made by the Senate to Medicaid.

So in the end, Trump will indeed to get to sign his big beautiful bill tomorrow on the 4th. A major political win for him and for Speaker Johnson, at least in the short run. However from both a process standpoint and a substantive standpoint, it’s hard to view OBBBA as anything but an abomination. And the bill itself appears to be very unpopular. Once the dust settles I will try to memorialize what OBBBA actually does.

In other news, yesterday a district court judge ruled, in a case captioned RAICES v. Noem, against a Proclamation issued by Trump on Inauguration Day called “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion”, the main effect of which was to conduct an end-run around the normal asylum system. Quoting from the opinion:

“[T]he Court concludes that neither the INA nor the Constitution grants the President or the Agency Defendants authority to replace the comprehensive rules and procedures set forth in the INA and the governing regulations with an extra-statutory, extra-regulatory regime for repatriating or removing individuals from the United States, without an opportunity to apply for asylum or withholding of removal and without complying with the regulations governing CAT protection. The Court recognizes that the Executive Branch faces enormous challenges in preventing and deterring unlawful entry into the United States and in adjudicating the overwhelming backlog of asylum claims of those who have entered the country. … [But] nothing in the INA or the Constitution grants the President or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the Proclamation and implementing guidance. An appeal to necessity cannot fill that void.”

I was amused to note that the judge worked in a reference to Kavanaugh’s concurrence last week in Trump v. CASA. The judge’s decision grants immediate relief to a small set of named plaintiffs, and then certifies a class of individuals still present in the U.S. but who are potentially impacted by the Proclamation, and grants relief to that class postponed for 14 days (giving the administration an opportunity to seek a stay pending appeal). The decision does not address those individuals who have already been deported under the Proclamation, but litigation will continue on that issue.

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