The Senate on Monday finally released its first wave of changes to the House-passed reconciliation bill, and Republican critics with opposing views on everything from Medicaid to tax policy found one thing they could agree on: They don’t like the new legislation.
Conservatives inside and outside the Senate don’t think the cuts go far enough. Republican champions of Medicaid think the cuts to that program are far too much. And House GOP lawmakers who fought hard for a huge increase to the state and local tax deduction — only to see the Senate completely disregard the increase — are incensed, promising they won’t support the bill unless every dollar they negotiated for SALT is in the final legislation.
Already, key House Republicans are declaring the bill “dead on arrival.” And Republicans say they expect the text will change, again, despite weeks of talks leading up to this version of the legislation.
“It’s a negotiation,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday. “Obviously, there had to be some marker in the bill to start with, but we’re prepared to have discussions with our colleagues here in the Senate and figure out a landing spot.”
That negotiating position Thune referred to was detailed in text released Monday afternoon by the Senate Finance Committee, which revealed key provisions in the Senate’s version of the bill related to Medicaid and the SALT deduction. That included lowering the Medicaid provider tax to 3.5%, which would decrease the ability for states to use the tax to fund their Medicaid programs, and decreasing the carefully negotiated SALT deduction cap from $40,000 a year to the current $10,000 a year.
While Senate GOP leadership says its proposal is merely a starting point, it’s unclear just how and when leaders plan to work out the kinks.
The Senate is slated to leave town Wednesday. The House is out of town this week. There are just two weeks left of scheduled session before July 4, the date Republicans have vowed to have the bill to the president’s desk by.
“There’s not a lot of time, if we do it by the Fourth of July,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said. “I would expect that they have already been in discussions — ‘they’ being the leadership of the relevant committees.”
At this point, an official conference between the House and Senate, which has been a solution to previous reconciliation negotiations, isn’t likely. Time is short, conferences are time-consuming, and Cramer argued it doesn’t necessarily have to be that formal.
“A round of negotiating could be a phone call, you know, between a couple of principals,” he said.
For now, in lieu of a formal conference, lawmakers are having meetings. Senate Republicans met for a closed-door briefing Monday night to discuss the newly revealed text from the Senate Finance Committee’s portion of the bill. They’ll meet again tomorrow for their weekly all-conference lunch.
Senators coming into the building on Monday were still sifting through the text released that afternoon. Medicaid and health care provisions in particular remain a problem in the Senate, with lawmakers concerned about cutting care to qualified beneficiaries.
But coming out of Monday night’s briefing, it was clear not everyone was happy.
Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the bill’s chief Republican critics, told reporters he was “alarmed” by proposed changes to the provider tax and said he was eager to see what the president thinks. President Donald Trump previously told House Republicans not to “fuck with Medicaid” — a point Hawley has repeatedly alluded to.
“This is a major departure from the House framework,” Hawley said. “This takes me totally by surprise. … This needs a lot of work, in my view.”
Other critics of the bill were more tight-lipped — but still didn’t endorse the new framework as a fix-all.
Sen. Ron Johnson said “it’s still early in the process” and “there are many good things about what the House is doing.” But, he said, “the problem is it just simply doesn’t meet the moment.”
Sen. Rick Scott still had concerns on the Medicaid language, where he and other conservatives have been looking for deeper cuts. But he acknowledged leadership is “working their butts off” and “everybody’s gonna try to work together to get the 51 votes.”
“We got to get the cost of government down,” Scott said. “The cost of government is just too high, so we’ve got to figure out how to reduce the cost of government. We’re in a big deficit.”
Others simply weren’t willing to discuss the new language altogether.
The typically chatty Sen. John Cornyn told reporters Monday night that “this is way too complicated to be talking about it in a hallway.”
SALT taxes are primarily a House issue, with a key contingent of New York Republicans saying they will not support the bill at that level. Rep. Mike Lawler, one of the House’s most outspoken voices on the SALT deduction, posted on X: “Consider this the response to the Senate’s ‘negotiating mark’: DEAD ON ARRIVAL.”
It’s not entirely unusual for a bill of this magnitude to have these sorts of back-and-forth negotiations. But Republicans are increasingly at risk of bypassing their self-imposed deadline, which they’d desperately like to avoid. There’s massive pressure to deliver Trump a legislative win, and lawmakers have no desire to stay in town during their July 4 recess.
Thune has already said he’d force the Senate to stick around if the bill isn’t passed.
Further complicating the timeline, given Senate changes to the legislation, the House will already need to repass the bill. But if the Senate sends something objectionable back to the House, and it’s changed by the House again, that means the Senate would need to reconvene to also pass the bill again before it goes to Trump’s desk.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin said the goal is to avoid that.
“I can’t stress it enough: What we want to do is make sure that we don’t go back and forth,” Mullin told reporters after Monday night’s meeting. “So what we pass here, we want to try to make sure it’s something that they can pass over there.”
“Now there’s a lot of personalities in the room,” Mullin said, “and a lot of people that say, ‘Let’s do our bill, and they can do their bill, and then we’ll go to conference,’ but that, it slows down the process. And we also realize that we need to get a bill passed.”
—
Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Shifra Dayak, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.