Nobody wants to be the fallback guy. Except the U.S. Senate.
Despite President Donald Trump publicly endorsing the House’s one-bill approach to reconciliation, GOP senators are charging ahead with their two-bill package. The effort has taken weeks of deliberations, and will take hours more of votes on the Senate floor as Democrats seek to amend the bill on Thursday night. Votes are expected to go into the early hours of Friday morning.
Still, Senate Republicans say they’re not dissuaded by Trump’s preference for Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan.
“He was never neutral. I mean, he always preferred the big bill,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said of Trump. “But he also never dissuaded us. And still hasn’t. He hasn’t really said we shouldn’t do it.”
“I get the sense that the signal he’s sending is that we should have a plan B,” Cramer added.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville conceded that senators “might be jumping the gun,” but said he doesn’t think it’s a waste of time. He, like many Republican senators, thinks a visit from Vice President JD Vance earlier this week relayed as much.
“JD came in yesterday and said, ‘Do what you need to do,’” Tuberville said. “He didn’t say, you know, ‘Shut this thing down. We don’t want to do it. We want to wait for the House.’ He said, you know, ‘Go at your own pace.’”
Rather than taking the president’s decree that he wants just one bill, some sources believe there is a group of White House aides who are covertly banking on the Senate’s success. The House GOP has hardly built a reputation of being able to reliably pass complex legislation. In an exceptionally rare occurrence, Republicans in the House currently have a smaller majority than Republicans in the Senate.
One source involved in the reconciliation negotiations told NOTUS that “there are some in the White House undermining” Trump’s decision and actually pushing for the two-bill approach.
“They want to see the House fail,” this source said.
But one White House official said they’re letting the Senate move forward with the two-bill method in case they need a plan B, not because they necessarily want the House to fail.
“Nobody wants to see the House fail. But if they do, there has to be a backup plan,” the official said.
Trump seems to understand that point, even if he’s standing by his position that he wants “one big, beautiful bill,” as he told Sen. Josh Hawley on Thursday.
“He was unequivocal,” Hawley said of Trump.
Trump did thank Senate Majority Leader John Thune in a post on Truth Social for “working so hard on funding the Trump Border Agenda.”
“We are setting records, the likes of which have never been seen before, on stopping criminal illegals [sic] aliens from entering our Country,” Trump wrote. “Put simply, we are delivering for the American People, far faster and, more successfully, than anyone thought possible. Your work on funding this effort is greatly appreciated!”
House members are set to move ahead next week with their budget resolution, teeing up their ability to move forward on a broader reconciliation bill. But by jamming all of their priorities into one piece of legislation, Republicans have set up an intraparty showdown on touchy subjects like taxes, entitlements and everything else in Trump’s legislative agenda.
It makes the math for passage murky, at best.
“Maybe they have a better read on how you get the votes in the House,” Sen. Thom Tillis said of Trump backing the House’s plan. “I see the argument for ‘one big, beautiful bill,’ but I also see the complexities that come with it.”
After weeks of Republicans assuring the press that the Senate would have no problem passing whatever the House sends over, there are suddenly real questions whether that’s true. The House’s budget resolution has provisions that are almost certainly nonstarters in the Senate, like making Trump’s tax cuts permanent.
“There are things that would be trip wires for me,” Tillis said. “But I’m not willing to talk about what they are now because I just need to respond to a package.”
A senior Senate GOP aide explained that the price tag of what the House is discussing was simply too steep for senators. “The math simply doesn’t work,” this aide said. “The House has provided no details about how the president’s tax agenda will be fully implemented.”
The reality is, however, Republicans in the House have actually hinted how they plan to at least partially pay for tax cuts that would cost an estimated $4.5 trillion over the next decade: entitlement cuts.
Politically unpopular reductions to programs like Medicare and Medicaid seem to be exactly how House Republicans plan to square some of the math for Trump’s ambitious tax overhaul, even if Trump himself says he has no plans to make those cuts.
“Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched,” Trump said Tuesday night during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
But, statutorily, House Republicans are planning to make runway for tax cuts by slashing those programs. To get the budget out of committee in the House, the committee’s chair, Rep. Jodey Arrington, had to adopt an amendment that would essentially tie tax cuts to entitlement cuts.
Simply put: That’s a problem for Senate Republicans.
The whole standoff between the House and Senate is a clunky foray into legislating, and the disagreements are already jeopardizing Trump’s agenda. With the Senate filibuster intact, budget reconciliation is the GOP’s best — and really only — chance at passing Trump’s policy priorities.
And yet, rather than fighting Democrats, Republicans are fighting amongst themselves, even after touting their unity following an election that gave them unified control of Washington.
“We’re completely united on where we want to get to,” Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso told NOTUS. “We want to prevent this huge $4 trillion tax increase. We want to secure the border. We want to have American peace through strength, and we want to unleash American energy. There are different tactical ways to get there. All the Republicans are united into getting to that end zone.”
When asked by reporters whether the House’s reconciliation bill could pass the Senate, however, Barrasso was cagey.
“I’m for whatever can get the 218 in the House and the 51 in the Senate,” he said.
Deciphering what bill that is could be quite difficult and time-consuming. And senators are betting that, ultimately, two bills — even if they’re more limited in scope than Trump and some Republicans wished — could be better than zero.
“While this may be an unnecessary exercise, sort of, it does provide an immediate solution, should the House break down,” Cramer said of the Senate moving ahead with its reconciliation process. “There’s plenty of evidence that that’s possible.”
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Ursula Perano and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.