On issues including tariffs, taxes, public media like PBS and NPR, and Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense, Vice President J.D. Vance broke seven tied Senate votes this year.
Here’s a breakdown of Vance’s seven tiebreaking votes.
But first, a quick comparison
How do Vance’s seven tiebreaking votes in a year stack up to his recent predecessors?
Vance’s immediate predecessor, Kamala Harris, broke seven tied votes in 2023, 11 in 2022, and 15 in 2021 – the most ever in a single year. (However, she broke none in 2024.)
Vance’s precursor as Donald Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, broke six tied votes in 2017 and seven in 2018. (Though none in 2019 or 2020.)
Confirming Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary
The vote
Military veteran and Fox News television host Pete Hegseth was a controversial nominee due to allegations of spousal abuse, sexual assault, and alcohol abuse. (Hegesth admitted to infidelity but denies the claims of abuse and assault.)
Three Republican senators voted against him: Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). No Senate Democrat voted in favor.
On January 24, Vance cast the tiebreaking vote.
Interestingly, this marked only the second time that a Cabinet nominee was confirmed by a tiebreaking Senate vote – with the other time also under Trump. In 2017, Pence cast the tiebreaking vote for Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.
What Vance said
Vance argued Hegseth would shake up a military system that had produced failed wars like Afghanistan and Iraq. For the former, the Taliban reclaimed control in 2021. For the latter, no promised weapons of mass destruction were found.
"I think Pete is a disrupter, and a lot of people don't like that disruption," Vance said in his first interview as vice president, with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s Face the Nation. "If you think about all of those bipartisan, massive votes, we have to ask ourselves, what did they get us? They got us a country where we fought many wars over the last 40 years, but haven't won a war about as long as I've been alive."
What Republican opponents said
Murkowski cited Hegseth’s limited and troubling leadership experience.
“His leadership of two veteran organizations was marked with accusations of financial mismanagement and problems with the workplace culture he fostered,” Murkowski said in a January statement.
She also voiced concerns about his views on women in the military, particularly his hesitancy towards women serving in combat roles.
“Women have served our nation with distinction, overcoming immense obstacles to excel in combat and leadership roles,” Murkowski added. “They deserve to know that their leader honors and values their commitment to our nation.”
McConnell, meanwhile, was unimpressed by Hegseth’s answers during his confirmation hearings.
“Mr. Hegseth provided no substantial observations on how to defend Taiwan or the Philippines against a Chinese attack, or even whether he believes the United States should do so,” McConnell said in a January statement. “Absent, too, was any substantive discussion of countering our adversaries’ alignment with deeper alliance relationships.”
Upholding Trump’s national emergency on trade
The vote
On April 2, President Trump issued an executive order declaring the U.S. trade deficit a national emergency, implementing tariffs on a host of nations, including many international allies.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced legislation to overturn this national emergency. Three Senate Republicans crossed party lines: Sens. Collins, Murkowski, and Rand Paul (R-KY). No Senate Democrat crossed party lines.
On April 30, Vance cast the tiebreaking vote to table the bill.
What Vance said
Vance argued that tariffs level the playing field against nations that have been undercutting American employees with low wages and working conditions.
“You hear people saying, ‘Well, how dare Donald Trump impose tariffs on foreign countries,’” Vance said at a March speech in Michigan. “And the answer is that unless you're willing to use American power to fight back against what those countries have been doing for a generation, you are never going to rebuild American manufacturing and you're never going to support the American worker.”
“When foreign countries make it impossible to ship American cars into their countries, why have we had leadership that refuses to fight back?” Vance continued. “When we have foreign countries that use slave labor that undercuts the wages of American workers, why have we had American leadership that has refused to fight back?”
What Republican opponents said
Sen. Paul countered that such important policies should be determined by an institution like Congress, rather than an individual.
Especially if that individual is someone like Trump, who’s frequently changed tariff rates on other countries for such minor reasons as he didn’t like how Brazil was treating his friend or he didn’t like a commercial Ontario (Canada) aired during the World Series.
“No country, no business, no family can plan a budget when the import tax rates and the cost of every commodity are determined by the whims of one man,” Paul said in a Senate floor speech. “There are now tariffs on steel, tariffs on aluminum, tariffs on lumber – and they change from day to day. But not one of these tariffs was voted on by the people’s elected representatives in Congress. These tariffs are simply announced by presidential proclamation.”
What happens now
Interestingly, the Senate would have voted to overturn Trump’s national emergency back in April, but two senators who likely would have voted that way were absent. Sen. McConnell was sick, while Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was traveling from South Korea.
More than six months later, on Nov. 3, with Sens. McConnell and Whitehouse now present and voting in favor, the Senate actually did vote to overturn the national emergency. However, House odds of passage are low – in April, Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t even allow a vote on the measure at all.
One Big Beautiful Bill Act
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the biggest legislation Republicans have enacted this Congress: a combination of tax breaks, new spending on immigration and border enforcement, and deregulations, particularly in the energy sector.
Three Senate Republicans voted against: Collins, Rand Paul, and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). No Senate Democrats voted in favor.
On July 1, Vance cast the tiebreaking vote for it.
Earlier that day, Vance also cast two tiebreaking votes in favor of two amendments to the bill introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The Senate votes were the exact same as for the “main” bill, with those same three Senate Republicans voting against.
What Vance said
Vance argued the legislation would supercharge the American economy and put more money in the pockets of working people.
“Here's what the One Big Beautiful Bill means for you in very concrete terms. Number one, we're going to see take-home pay go up in the United States of America. In this district, probably 7,000, $8,000 per family over the next three to four years,” Vance said at a July speech in Ohio.
“If you build or expand a great American factory, the federal government is going to reward you instead of penalize you, for a change. I think that's the biggest provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Vance continued. “Invest in American workers, invest in American companies.”
What Republican opponents said
After Sen. Tillis announced he would oppose the bill, the internal Republican backlash was so severe that he announced mere days later that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2026.
Medicaid cuts were his litmus test.
“I told the president, I really do believe it could be his Obamacare,” Tillis said in his first interview after the vote, with Jake Tapper on CNN’s The Lead.
“Because of the promise that [Obama] made, which was not true: ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,’” Tapper clarified.
“And now it’s like: ‘If you like Medicaid and you’re eligible, you can keep it,’ Tillis answered. “That’s fundamentally untrue, because the funding mechanisms are probably going to take people who are eligible for it off of it over time. Or it’s going to create an enormous unfunded mandate on the states, in a timeframe that they can’t absorb.”
What happened next
Two days later, on July 3, the House passed the larger overall legislation by 218-214. Two House Republicans voted against: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA1) and Thomas Massie (R-KY4). No House Democrat voted in favor.
President Trump signed it into law on July 4, timed to Independence Day.
Rescissions Act
In March, Trump requested Congress rescind money for 22 government programs equaling $9.4 billion. These proposed cuts would primarily target international assistance like USAID and public media like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds local NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service) stations.
On July 15, two procedural votes were held on whether to advance to a roll call on the actual bill itself – essentially a “vote on whether to hold a vote.”
For both procedural votes, three Senate Republicans voted against: Sens. Collins, McConnell, and Murkowski. No Senate Democrats voted in favor.
Vance cast the tiebreaker for both.
What Trump said
The Trump-Vance administration argued that the conditions prompting the initial creation of public media 58 years ago no longer hold, in an era of mass websites, podcasts, apps, and cable television.
“Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” Trump said in a May executive order banning executive departments and agencies from funding CPB. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary, but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
What Republican opponents said
Collins countered that PBS and NPR stations are a vital lifeline for local communities.
“In Maine, this funding supports everything from emergency communications in rural areas, to coverage of high school basketball championships, and a locally-produced high school quiz show,” Collins said in a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. “Nationally-produced television programs such as Antiques Roadshow and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood are also enjoyed by many throughout our country.”
“I understand, however, the concern about subsidizing the national radio news programming that for years has had a discernibly partisan bent,” Collins acknowledged. “There are, however, more targeted approaches to addressing that bias at NPR than rescinding all of the funding.”
Later votes
The actual Rescissions Act itself was ultimately enacted later that week.
On July 17, the Senate passed the “actual” bill by 51-48. Two Senate Republicans voted against: Collins and Murkowski. No Democrats voted in favor. (Interestingly, McConnell voted in favor of the actual recissions, despite earlier voting against the bill’s procedural votes.)
The next day, on July 18, the House passed it by 216-213. Two House Republicans voted against: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA1) and Mike Turner (R-OH10). No House Democrat voted in favor.
President Trump signed it into law on July 24.
In August, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) – which has funded U.S. public media, including PBS and NPR since 1967 – announced it would shut down in January 2026. However, PBS or NPR themselves will almost certainly continue to exist, due to a combination of listener or viewer donations, corporate or nonprofit contributions, and U.S. states' funding.Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.