As Senate Republicans war with the parliamentarian and themselves to advance President Donald Trump’s massive reconciliation bill, the upper chamber is bracing for yet another battle posing an existential threat to the legislation: The House.
“Now it’s turning into Frankenstein,” Rep. Andy Ogles said of the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act. “It’s not big and beautiful anymore.”
“Everything they’re talking about doing makes it worse,” he said of the Senate. “And you have a parliamentarian that is working against, quite frankly, America.”
A high-stakes Senate versus House reconciliation standoff has been brewing since the two chambers sparred last year over whether congressional Republicans should tackle Trump’s legislative agenda in one bill or two.
But now the Senate positions itself to temper the House’s carefully negotiated Medicaid cuts and the state and local tax deduction — all while spending a projected $400 billion more than the House’s version of the bill.
House Republicans are steeling themselves for the long-simmering tensions with Senate Majority Leader John Thune to finally come to a head. And they are prepared to fight back.
At least, they say they are.
“It needs to meet the framework that the House established and that the Senate agreed to. Thune agreed, in essence, we’re going to be deficit neutral,” conservative Rep. Eric Burlison told NOTUS. “Any tax cuts, we have to find reciprocal spending reductions.”
“We wrote letters,” he said, recounting the conservative push for cuts in their version of the legislation. “We fought. We got them to do the press conference. We got the Trump administration to agree.”
If Senate Republicans don’t comply with the House’s framework for reconciliation, Burlison said he and his fellow conservatives are on “good grounds” to push back, adding that he was about to get on a phone call with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to discuss his concerns.
If conservatives plan to actually act on their frustrations, their rage against the Senate could pose a real threat to the bill, given Speaker Mike Johnson just barely persuaded the Freedom Caucus to back the House version of the bill last month.
The Senate’s proposed adjustments to the House-approved $715 billion in Medicaid cuts present the most politically complex problems that Johnson will have to detangle when the Senate ultimately advances its version of the legislation. But there are plenty of other issues ruffling conservatives, including the Senate rolling back cuts to Inflation Reduction Act clean energy subsidies.
“I think there’s still a lot of us with big concerns on some of the changes the Senate made, especially with the IRA,” Rep. Eli Crane told NOTUS. “So I’m hoping that more work continues to be done on it, to get it to a better place where it’s more palatable.”
Further complicating the interchamber jockeying, the Senate parliamentarian nixed a number of Medicaid cuts from the Senate bill Thursday — including, for example, a provision preventing illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid benefits — leaving a score of politically sensitive issues in procedural purgatory.
Conservatives have long said the Senate needs to pursue $1.5 trillion cuts in the bill to keep them on board. With that prospect looking increasingly dubious, conservatives amped up the volume on their criticisms Thursday.
“He’s given control of the United States Senate to the Senate parliamentarian, who all of us had to Google to see who the hell she was,” Rep. Clay Higgins said of Thune.
“She has removed whole sections of the bill that we needed to negotiate with the factions of the Senate so that they could land a plane at the same airport,” he said of Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. “And she has closed down all the runways.”
While there were plenty of conservatives eager to vent about MacDonough, the underlying question that could determine the fate of the reconciliation bill boils down to this: If the Senate doesn’t hit the House’s spending reduction targets, would conservatives swallow their reservations when the bill comes back to the House?
To hear House conservatives tell it Thursday afternoon, the answer is no.
“It’s getting less and less beautiful,” Rep. Victoria Spartz told NOTUS.
Of course, the ranting could simply be what’s become routine conservative bluster. Conservatives are prone to talking tough right up until the moment when they ultimately flip and support whatever Trump desires. They did it with Johnson’s speakership vote. They did it with government funding. And they did it on the House’s version of the reconciliation bill.
After all, Trump is hardly shy about threatening members with primary challenges. And he doesn’t seem overly concerned with the specifics of the spending package itself, with House Republicans telling NOTUS last month that their impression of the president after a closed-door reconciliation meeting was that, “He’s not a detail guy.”
But House conservatives are currently steeped in the minutiae and more than willing to vocalize that the Senate’s bill may fall woefully short of their demands.
“I just don’t think we can have huge deficits,” Rep. Mark Harris, a freshman Freedom Caucus member, told NOTUS.
“We had a framework that the House sent over, and to me, we’ve got to make sure that we maintain the spending cuts as well,” he continued. “It’s really a balancing act, quite frankly, and I want to make sure that the spending cuts are there.”
Other prominent hard-liners have gone further, issuing anti-Senate screeds on social media.
“I’m currently a NO,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on X about the bill. “We need to pass President Trump’s GREAT tax promises! We need to pass President Trump’s GREAT energy plan! And we need to fund President Trump’s GREAT Border Patrol and ICE! But we do not need to pass a One Big Beautiful Bill that continues to fund sex changes on kids, Medicare and Medicaid for illegals, and destroys federalism!!!”
Rep. Chip Roy was more concise.
“The Senate bill goes the wrong direction,” Roy posted on X Thursday. “It needs to improve before it comes back to the house.”
As has been the case during the months of reconciliation negotiations, House conservatives aren’t the only potential roadblock to passage. Moderates have already laid down a marker against some of the Senate’s more aggressive Medicaid cost-cutting proposals. And even though the Senate parliamentarian ruled against the Medicaid provider tax cut, senators are trying to rewrite the proposal in some way so that the tax is reduced.
A group of 16 moderates already sent a letter to Thune and Johnson earlier this week issuing an ultimatum — eliminate the Senate’s cuts to the Medicaid provider tax or the group would tank the bill on the floor.
“Look, obviously, we’ll see how many votes they have to get it through their own chamber,” Rep. Mike Lawler, who signed the letter, told NOTUS. “But obviously, there’s a lot of issues that are getting worked out. And, you know, obviously the parliamentarian’s decisions are reframing the bills.”
As Johnson told reporters after the parliamentarian’s ruling, the nixed provisions don’t “make it easier.”
“But you know me,” he said. “Hope springs eternal, and we’re gonna work around the clock and try to meet that deadline.”
The deadline in question is July 4, now just a week away. Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week that members of Congress need to “lock yourself in a room if you must, don’t go home and GET THE DEAL DONE THIS WEEK.”
One key conservative told NOTUS he is fine with the last-minute scramble and is happy to consider the bill on the House floor by next Friday — so he can try to kill it.
“The president has said everyone should stay in town and work this out,” Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Andy Harris said. “At this point, whether it’s rejected by fiscal hawks in the Senate or fiscal hawks in the House, it just moves the process along.”
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.