When Senate Republicans entered their weekly closed-door lunch on Tuesday, lawmakers said they were eager to make progress on their massive reconciliation bill.
By the time they came out of that meeting, however — after Elon Musk trashed the legislation as a “disgusting abomination” and a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” — Republicans seemed even further from consensus.
Senate Republican leaders have readily acknowledged the reconciliation bill would change in the upper chamber. But there is hardly any agreement on how it will change.
Conservatives would like to see spending reined in more, with potentially more cuts on top of the $700 billion House Republicans already cut from Medicaid and the $300 billion they slashed from food benefits. But there’s also a key group of GOP senators who want to dramatically water down the Medicaid reductions, saying they won’t go along with a bill that takes away coverage from their constituents.
As Sen. Markwayne Mullin said Tuesday, “It’s called negotiating. Everyone wants their fingerprints on it.”
Musk seems to be one of those people who wants to make his mark. He could be seeking changes — like an extension of electric vehicle tax credits — or he could just want to sink the legislation.
Either way, Musk raising spending objections could complicate the politics for Republicans, giving conservatives inside and outside of Congress room to oppose the legislation without branding themselves as MAGA heretics. It also could make it more difficult for those senators who want to extend current tax rates without the spending cuts the House passed. Musk was able to blow up a bipartisan spending deal in December by arguing it was financially irresponsible.
Emerging from the meeting on Tuesday, the more likely a senator was to agree with Musk on the reconciliation bill, the more likely they were to have seen his online broadsides.
Sen. Ron Johnson said Musk’s social media posts were “spread around pretty fast” among Senate Republicans.
Sen. Mike Rounds said the posts weren’t discussed in the meeting, “but we were aware of it.”
Sen. Thom Tillis said Musk was “entitled to his opinion.”
“I think that’s a bit strong,” he said of Musk’s assessment of the legislation.
And Sen. Josh Hawley, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of Medicaid cuts, was satisfied to say that he “can’t wait” to see President Donald Trump’s reaction.
(Hawley didn’t attend the meeting on Tuesday, but a reporter showed him one of Musk’s posts.)
Senators who did show up said the discussion Tuesday was mostly about tax provisions, with Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, speaking to the group.
Rounds told NOTUS that Hassett did a “very nice job” discussing the “tax side” of the bill. Tillis echoed that sentiment, saying, “Kevin’s focused on the tax piece, and I thought he did a really good job of building the case for why we’ve got to move forward with it.”
Of course, given the constantly evolving politics, passage won’t be a quick or easy task. Senate Republicans still haven’t decided how they’ll handle the Medicaid portions of the legislation, and GOP leaders don’t exactly know what to do with the complaints from conservatives that the bill would worsen the deficit.
They’re also facing the prospect of losing some policy provisions to parliamentary challenges, which would make House passage tougher when the bill finally gets back to that chamber.
Senate GOP leaders say they’re sensitive to the House’s small margins and how carefully negotiated the bill was in order to pass. Still, they know they have to make changes in their chamber to clear their own 51-vote threshold.
“Individual members are going to stake out their positions,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday. “You’ve heard a number of them already have, on the reconciliation bill and individual pieces of it people don’t like. But in the end we have to succeed. Failure is not an option.”
As for next steps, Senate Republicans plan to meet again Wednesday. And again on Thursday. And so on and so forth. Senators love meetings.
On Wednesday, the group will hold another closed-door session to dig into specifics of the bill. Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso said there’s a demand for further discussions, particularly after the Senate just came off a week of recess.
Barrasso noted that Republicans recently had a conference meeting at the Library of Congress to discuss policy priorities.
“And members said, ‘You know, we like this. This is good. This is a good discussion. And let’s do it again,’” Barrasso said. “So now we’re back, people have been at home, and now we’ll have a chance to do it again.”
On Wednesday, the Senate Republican Steering Committee will also host its weekly lunch, with Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, joining Republicans to discuss the proposed Medicaid changes. And even though senators appear likely to leave town by Thursday afternoon, Republicans stress that conversations will be near-constant.
Multiple Republican senators have already spoken with Trump this week. And during last week’s recess, Senate offices were actively reviewing the legislation, knowing it’s likely that multiple provisions in the bill would be stripped out over parliamentary concerns.
While Trump’s involvement is meant to speed up passage, that’s not a certain outcome. Trump’s known to ad lib much of his discussions on policy, and throughout the entirety of the reconciliation process, he’s seemed hesitant to openly endorse one chamber’s preferences over the others.
What’s more, House Republicans are likely to care far less than Senate Republicans about what the parliamentarian has to say.
When asked by reporters Monday on whether he’d rule out overruling the parliamentarian, Thune simply said, “We’re not going there.”
For now, Senate Republicans will continue discussing the legislation and probing the different factions to see who’s most amenable to swallowing changes. But it will take more time — and more meetings — before lawmakers emerge with a bill of their own.
When NOTUS asked Tillis what he expects from the meeting Wednesday, his answer didn’t exactly bode well for a speedy resolution.
“A miracle,” he said.
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS.