House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) broke the record Thursday for longest speech delivered on the House floor, talking for 8 hours 44 minutes against Republicans’ massive tax and immigration bill. Jeffries started speaking before 5 a.m. — taking advantage of the “Magic Minute” custom that allows party leadership to speak for any length of time — and decried the GOP’s legislation and Republicans’ efforts to pass it in the middle of the night to get it to President Donald Trump’s desk by a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
“Donald Trump’s deadline may be Independence Day. That ain’t my deadline,” Jeffries said to applause. “You know why? … We don’t work for Donald Trump. We work for the American people. That’s why we’re right here now, on the floor of the House of Representatives, standing up for the American people.”
The House passed the bill Thursday afternoon in a 218-214 vote along party lines. Here are five notable things Jeffries said in his attempt to delay the final vote.
Jeffries repeatedly decried Trump’s spending bill for its historic cuts to spending on social safety-net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). He also highlighted many amendments Democrats tried to make to the measure that House Republicans opposed. Some of those amendments, he argued, would have saved many Americans’ eligibility for food assistance and health care access.
“Budgets are moral documents,” Jeffries said, repeating a quote originated by Martin Luther King Jr. “And in our view, Mr. Speaker, budgets should be designed to lift people up. This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now on the floor of the House of Representatives tears people down. This reckless Republican budget is an amoral document, and everybody should vote no against it because of how it attacks children and seniors and everyday Americans and people with disabilities.”
It would only take four Republicans with “John McCain-levels of courage” to stop the massive tax and immigration bill, Jeffries said at one point, referring to the GOP’s slim majority in the House, as well as to how the bill is expected to affect health care coverage and access for millions of Americans.
McCain, then a Republican senator from Arizona, famously voted against a GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. McCain died in 2018. At the mention of McCain, Democrats on the House floor rose and applauded. When Jeffries said this, there were about a dozen House Republicans on the floor, but only one clapped for the late Republican senator and former presidential nominee.
“Every single one of my House Republican colleagues have the opportunity now, in this chamber — not the other chamber, in this chamber — to join us as Democrats and stand up for what is right,” Jeffries said. “The eyes of America are watching.”
Jeffries noted some of his GOP colleagues once held “principled opposition” to Trump’s massive tax and immigration bill — a few as recently as “several hours ago.” Notably, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) had called the version of the bill passed by the Senate a “nonstarter” on Tuesday and then voted to advance it Wednesday night.
Any remaining GOP opposition to the bill evaporated after hours of negotiations and calls with Trump, during which holdouts were persuaded to back the measure. Norman, a prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, cited vague promises of executive action in an interview with CNBC on Thursday morning.
“Don’t you have some responsibility … to say to the American people what happened?” Jeffries said in his speech, alluding to the conversations that took place to change the holdouts’ minds. “What deals were cut? What occurred in the back room? Yes, it will all come out. One way or the other.”
Some of the most boisterous applause for Jeffries came after he accused nameless Republicans of being corrupt.
“Extraordinary to me, Mr. Speaker, that you got folks in this town talking about draining the swamp. Guess what? You are the swamp. You are the swamp. You are the swamp,” Jeffries said, as his Democratic colleagues clapped. “We’ve never seen anything like this. The type of corruption that has been unleashed on the American people and has poisoned, Mr. Speaker, this bill.”
Afterward, Jeffries said he thought he saw a Republican consulting the parliamentarian, likely to complain that Jeffries had leveled a personal insult, which is generally prohibited on the House floor.
“I said people in this town,” he clarified.
Jeffries ended his speech with a look ahead at the midterm elections next year and a note of optimism for Democrats, who have vowed to use the unpopular cuts in the GOP’s tax and immigration bill as a way to win back the House majority.
First, though, Jeffries urged people to read the Declaration of Independence, part of which “reads like an indictment against an out-of-control king.” He joked that the framers of the Constitution had been fed up with “Project 1775” and so they implemented “Project 1776.”
“I know that there are people concerned with what’s happening in America,” Jeffries said. “But understand what our journey teaches us is that after Project 2025 comes Project 2026. And you will have an opportunity to end this national nightmare.”
With his Democratic colleagues cheering him on, Jeffries urged their supporters to “press on.”
“We’re going to press on until victory is won,” he said in ending his marathon address. “I yield back.”
Paul Kane contributed to this report.
