Senate Republicans appear ready to jam the House on reconciliation. The House swears it won’t happen.
“We’re not going to be jammed,” Speaker Mike Johnson told NOTUS in a brief interview on Tuesday. “If the product is dramatically different, then we won’t be able to meet the deadline, so I’m not going to force my members to do something that we haven’t fully processed.”
“The less modifications they make to our bill, the better,” Johnson added.
It’s a warning Johnson’s given the Senate repeatedly in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the upper chamber look to make major changes to the House-passed bill. Those warnings have grown tense in recent days as the Senate GOP looks to lower the provider tax cap in the bill — which critics say would gut funding for rural hospitals — and to lower the state and local tax deduction cap from the House’s carefully negotiated $40,000 figure.
More than a dozen House lawmakers have come forward publicly to say they would not support the Senate’s emerging version of the bill, which has not yet been fully written or released to the public. But with days left to spare, the Senate GOP still appears ready to sidestep a number of House demands for the sake of Senate approval.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said the back and forth between the chambers shouldn’t be surprising. He told NOTUS it’s the nature of the legislative process.
“This is nothing new for those of us who were here previously. It’s not unusual,” Barrasso said.
When another reporter asked Barrasso whether he thinks the House is bluffing, he said there are “different people that have different red lines on different components of this.”
“We’re going to continue working with a product in the Senate that will get passed — our goal is to get it passed this week in the Senate — and then send it to the House,” Barrasso said. “And I understand that the speaker of the House has said they’ll stay here until they pass it.”
Johnson has indeed said he plans to keep the House in session for the long haul. He told NOTUS that the House plans “on staying in session until we get the job done.”
“So let’s hope the job is shorter and not longer,” Johnson said.
Thune has also said the Senate plans to stay in session until the bill is passed.
The logistical issue for House Republicans, however, is that the Senate now has a first-mover advantage. They can pass the bill, say their job is done and ditch town for their scheduled recess. That would leave the House with a bill to pass just days before the Fourth of July deadline. If the House changes the bill again before passage, it would have to go back to the Senate, and the game of legislative ping-pong would continue.
Senate Republicans hope that doesn’t happen. They want the House to swallow a compromise deal, and have repeatedly stressed that no Senate Republicans live in SALT-heavy states, making the provision unimportant to practically all of their conference.
As for Medicaid cuts, Senate GOP lawmakers say they’re trying to strike a balance, with a number of their own members concerned about proposed language in the bill.
That solution isn’t obvious yet.
“You’ve got a lot of people that are up on a soapbox saying stuff,” Sen. Jim Justice said of the House’s objections. “At the end of the day, I think everybody will use good common sense, and they’ll come to their own conclusions.”
“If we don’t get this done right now, we’ll never get it done,” Justice said.
But he said that thinking cuts both ways. “If you get it done right now and it’s wrong, you may not ever have a chance to get it done again because the voters will speak,” Justice added.
With the Senate poised to barrel ahead, Thune and Johnson met Tuesday to try to strike a compromise. Johnson also huddled with members of the moderate Republican Governance Group for over an hour at their weekly lunch, where he heard concerns about the changes the Senate is proposing to the bill.
According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, the members focused their time expressing concerns with the Senate’s proposed Medicaid cuts. The source said members told Johnson they oppose the Senate’s proposal to change the provider tax, the proposed changes and caps on state directed payments and the Senate’s proposal on creating a hospital stabilization fund.
“Depends on what changes are made,” Rep. Don Bacon said of the Senate’s proposed changes, leaving the lunch. “If it’s close to what we got, I could see it. But if they’re significant, I think it’d be an uphill battle.”
Rep. Beth Van Duyne was much blunter. “I don’t think we’re gonna pass whatever the Senate sends us,” she said.
Van Duyne said she’s frustrated with how the Senate is scaling back the Inflation Reduction Act cuts and believes the upper chamber needs to leave their bill alone or, at the very least, cut more, not less.
The House Freedom Caucus agrees with her.
“The Senate’s watered-down OBBB is a joke: spending increases, delayed rollbacks of the Green New Scam, and no real Medicaid reform,” Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the caucus, said in a statement. “If leadership tries to jam it through, I will vote NO.”
Rep. Andy Harris, the chair of the Freedom Caucus who voted “present” on the bill back in May, also issued a similar warning to both the Senate and Johnson.
“If the Senate tries to jam the House with this version, I won’t vote ‘present.’ I’ll vote NO,” Harris said on X.
A group of 16 House Republican moderates also sent a letter to Thune on Tuesday stressing their objections to the Senate’s version of the bill’s Medicaid language. The Senate bill in particular would lower the provider tax cap from the House-approved 6% to 3.5%. The provider tax is a state-imposed fee that helps states fund their portion of Medicaid. Lawmakers are concerned that lowering the cap could have an adverse effect on rural hospitals.
“Protecting Medicaid is essential for the vulnerable constituents we were elected to represent,” the group wrote. “Therefore, we cannot support a final bill that threatens access to coverage or jeopardizes the stability of our hospitals and providers.”
The back-and-forth all comes as Senate GOP leadership is aiming for a vote on the bill this week — potentially as soon as Friday. That’d leave senators going through an all-night vote-a-rama on amendments, likely into the weekend, and sending the bill back to the House with roughly a week to spare before the Fourth of July deadline.
But Senate Republicans themselves don’t seem confident in that forecast.
Sen. Thom Tillis said he thinks a Friday vote is “unlikely,” but he does think the weekend is “possible.”
When NOTUS asked Sen. Ron Johnson whether he thought plans for a Friday vote were realistic, his entire response was “whatever.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, a notable holdout on the bill, said senators need to see text of the bill in order to make any decisions, and “they could do that theoretically in an hour or something.”
“But it’s really a matter of, have they reached any kind of conclusion?” Hawley said.
The answer, as Hawley tells it, is no.
When a reporter asked Hawley whether he’s seen progress on a rural hospital fund, which he and a number of other Senate Republicans hope mitigates concerns over the provider tax in the bill, he said he hadn’t.
When asked whether leadership had laid out a timeline for resolving text in the bill and voting, other than wanting it done by July 4, Hawley also said he hadn’t.
And when asked if leadership had provided any indication of how they plan to mitigate the dozens of House Republicans who say they will not vote for the bill, Hawley, again, said “no.”
“Sense a theme?” he said.
—
Ursula Perano and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.