‘Don’t you dare’: GOP’s Roy dismisses White House argument on megabill

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Vice President Vance and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller are centering their public closing arguments for the “big, beautiful bill” on immigration enforcement — prompting sharp pushback from one GOP holdout.

“Don’t you dare come to me and say this is about border,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is highly critical of the Senate’s changes to the bill and who serves as a barometer for other deficit hawks in the House GOP.

“This is a how-many-trillion-dollar bill, with how much in terms of debt and how many issues at play? You want to come back and tell me it’s about $150 billion border funding?” Roy told me.

Roy’s pushback came as Vance urged Republicans to brush aside concerns about deficits and Medicaid reforms in order to fuel President Trump’s mass deportation agenda with the billions for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), border agents, a border wall and other immigration enforcement priorities.

“Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vance posted on social platform X late Monday night.

Miller went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Monday night to stress the conservative wins in Trump’s tax cut and spending priorities bill.

“This is the most far-reaching border security proposal, Homeland Security proposal in my lifetime. Sean, not just my lifetime, going back to Eisenhower, going back to since we’ve had about the border,” Miller said.

And in an apparent response to House GOP complaints that the Senate parliamentarian stripped out a provision punishing states that give Medicaid benefits to immigrants who entered the country illegally, Miller posted Tuesday on X: “The best way to keep illegal aliens from getting free healthcare is to deport them.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson underscored the immigration messaging in a statement.

“President Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful bill slashes deficits and debt and unleashes economic growth while delivering on another one of the President’s key promises: deport criminal illegal aliens and permanently secure the border,” Jackson said. “While the President has already been extraordinarily successful on these two fronts, the One Big Beautiful Bill is critical to fortify his success and make the progress permanent.”

The public focus on the border and immigration arguments frustrated Roy, who pointed back to the one-or-two debate in January, when Republicans were debating whether to pursue one or two bills to enact Trump’s top legislative priorities through the budget reconciliation process — which allows them to bypass the 60-vote threshold and the need for Democratic votes in the Senate but that can only be used once per fiscal year.

The House Freedom Caucus had pitched a two-step strategy in January, quickly delivering a boost for Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda while addressing the tax cut extension later.

“I would direct them to the memo that we in the Freedom Caucus and conservatives put out,” Roy said. “Here’s the two-bill strategy. We will deliver you a debt ceiling increase. We will deliver you border funding. We will deliver you defense funding, and we want some modest, you know, upfront spending restraint to go along with that. And then let’s go debate tax and spend. And a different choice was made. And so here we are.”

Republicans, at the direction of Trump, ultimately went for the “one big, beautiful bill,” as Trump put it — eventually adopting the moniker as the official title of the legislation.

Trump addressed the multi- versus single-bill debate Tuesday: “Smaller bills would have been easy, but they wouldn’t have been as good.”

Putting all the bill sweeteners together is also useful for GOP leaders trying to push holdouts to support the bill and drag the legislation across the finish line — by making the exact kind of arguments that Vance and Miller are making.

Moderate Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who has expressed concerns about the bill’s Medicaid provisions and rollback of clean energy tax credits, acknowledged as much when I asked him about the arguments about putting concerns aside to advance the border security measures.

“I do think making the tax rates permanent, great plus ups in defense spending and added border security are huge assets to this bill,” Bacon said.

But are they big enough assets to overcome concerns from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum? The holdouts — who have long supported the major Trump agenda items in the bill — do not seem to be swayed by those arguments just yet.

William Martin, communications director to Vance, said in a statement that the vice president “worked tirelessly with Republican leadership and key White House officials to get the One Big Beautiful Bill through the Senate.”

“It was a demonstration to everyone in this party that the entire White House is steadfastly committed to getting this legislation through Congress and on President Trump’s desk before the week is over,” Martin said.

House Republicans are facing an incredibly difficult self-imposed July 4 deadline for final passage after the Senate approv