One is an iconoclast who regularly bucks the Republican Party line, but tangled regularly with the Biden administration, too.

One is probably best known as a Republican in Name Only.

And one has already announced he won’t be a Republican senator much longer.

Republicans couldn’t afford to lose any more than three GOP votes to win passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” — the tax and spending package crucial to President Donald Trump’s agenda. As it is, they lost three, and Vice President J.D. Vance had to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the bill to pass Tuesday.

The three GOP senators who defected but failed to stop the bill are already well known to Americans who follow politics, and one is paying a steep price for his stance.

Kentucky’s Rand Paul has a reputation as a fiscal hard-liner and a bare-knuckles brawler (as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci knows all too well).

He is often at odds with fellow Republicans, but is just as abrasive to Democrats.

His reasoning for opposing it was that it raises the nation’s debt ceiling, and he wants to bring what he calls “fiscal sanity” back to the government.

Throughout the Vote-a-rama, I was working all night to stop Congress from adding to our debt.

I met with @VP and I reiterated my offer to vote for the bill—if it included a 90% reduction in the debt ceiling.

No earmarks. No handouts. Just real fiscal reform.

I wasn’t looking…

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 1, 2025

(Paul’s fellow Kentucky senator, former Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — a public opponent of the president — actually voted for the bill.)

Maine’s Susan Collins has rarely made any bones about disliking President Donald Trump and is widely considered, with Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a RINO of the first order in the upper chamber.

Prior to the November election, she publicly announced she would not vote for Trump, just as she had not in 2016 or 2020, The Associated Press reported in July 2024. Instead, she said she would write in Trump’s defeated primary challenger, Nikki Haley.

(Her vote to confirm now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 probably marked the high point of her popularity among Republicans nationwide.)

In a statement after she voted against the bill Tuesday, she said she supported the bill’s tax cuts, but complained that its cuts to Medicaid went too far.

North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who has also antagonized the Trump White House, has announced he is retiring from the Senate when his current term ends next year.

Tillis also complained that the bill’s cuts to Medicaid were too much for him to accept. (Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies at the conservative Cato Institute, eviscerated Tillis’ reasoning in a column published Tuesday by the conservative but generally anti-Trump National Review.)

Considering that Tillis was “actively running” for re-election until making his announcement on Sunday, according to The Washington Post, the intra-party battle over the “Big Beautiful Bill” was almost certainly the deciding factor.

The fact that Trump himself had threatened to support an opponent to challenge Tillis for his seat in next year’s primary probably made the decision easy.

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