Senate Republicans are trying to quickly move forward with the reconciliation bill. It won’t be easy.
“There’s going to be a lot of trade-offs in this whole negotiation,” Sen. John Cornyn told reporters Monday evening. “How do we knit 51 senators together? Right now, it looks a little challenging.”
To pass the bill, Republican leaders will need to cut deals with nearly every corner of their conference and, like the House, lean on President Donald Trump and the White House to muscle the legislation over the goal line.
Trump is already taking calls and meetings with GOP senators this week, hoping to jam his legislative agenda through as quickly as possible. The problem is, he’s facing concerns from conservatives over spending levels and objections from a key group of Republicans over Medicaid cuts. And solving one problem likely exacerbates the other.
Despite the unresolved issues, Republicans still expect a finished product by some point in July — leaders are shooting to finish by the Fourth of July recess — but the exact date is murky.
The bill currently is slated to include a debt limit increase, with the federal government projected to run out of borrowing authority some time in August. That deadline, which will be a moving target depending on spending and revenue, will be a critical motivating factor for Republicans, who are trying to avoid having to pass a separate debt ceiling bill. But they have to overcome the concerns over spending and Medicaid cuts.
For now, leaders are expressing confidence.
“I think we’re on track, I hope, at least, to be able to produce something that we can pass through the Senate, send back to the House, have them pass and put on the president’s desk by the Fourth of July,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday.
Cornyn, while still optimistic about passage, was a bit more pessimistic about the timeline.
“We’ll get there eventually,” Cornyn said, “probably by the end of July, would be my guess.”
But the questions Republicans are trying to answer have no easy solution. Like in the House, there are Senate Republicans who are uncomfortable with Medicaid cuts and there are those who want massive spending reductions.
Ultimately, both sides in the House weren’t exactly satisfied. House moderates ended up swallowing the Medicaid cuts, while conservatives eventually went along with a bill that didn’t slash as much spending and impose as many Medicaid cuts as they wanted. Both factions went along, however, because they got something.
More moderate Republicans got an increase in the state and local tax deduction, saving wealthy homeowners in many of their states about $300 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Conservatives may have wanted more spending cuts, but the reconciliation bill at least hit the targets they had set in the House budget — and they got some last-minute sweeteners like nixing a firearm suppressors tax.
But it took Trump personally getting the conservatives in line to pass the bill in the House. And Republicans once again think the president will be key in the Senate. It’s one of the reasons Thune met with Trump on Monday, according to a source familiar.
Whether Trump will actually have the same effect in the Senate, however, remains to be seen.
“Senators aren’t quite as easily influenced by a mass lobbying effort,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told NOTUS. “It’s going to take one-on-one down the stretch, because the Senate will be a lot like the House; it’s going to be a very narrow margin.”
Senators, for one, have different political considerations than most House Republicans. While most GOP Representatives are in solidly red districts where a primary is their biggest threat, senators largely have more competitive general elections. They’re also further removed from year-to-year political calculations, considering their terms are for six years. And they’re more concerned with the effects legislation can have on their state budgets.
A big feature of the House reconciliation bill was transferring some costs of the federal social safety net onto the states. And while some of those more moderate House Republicans were satisfied to go along with Medicaid cuts because of the increased SALT deduction — raising how much homeowners can write off of their state and local taxes on their federal return from $10,000 to $40,000 — there aren’t really any Republican senators representing the blue states where that tax deduction comes into play for many of their constituents.
Conversely, there are enough Senate Republicans opposed to the roughly $700 billion in Medicaid cuts in the House legislation to tank the bill. And they believe they have Trump on their side.
On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley, who’s opposed to cuts to Medicaid for qualified beneficiaries, wrote on X that he “just had a great talk with President Trump about the Big, Beautiful Bill” and “he said again, NO MEDICAID BENEFIT CUTS.”
Sen. Susan Collins, who said she expects “a lot of discussions” this week, has also voiced concerns over the Medicaid provisions, as has Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
On the other side is a group of conservatives who want more cuts. Senate Steering Committee Chair Rick Scott, who’s against the bill in its current form, told NOTUS he’s tapped Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to appear at the Republican steering lunch this week. Scott said Oz will discuss “how to fix the Medicaid program.”
Complicating a compromise even further is the fact that the Senate plays by different rules than the House. In order to pass the budget under reconciliation, every provision has to be budget-related. The House bill has a buffet of conservative priorities that are likely to run into trouble with the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian, as she decides what is and what isn’t within the purview of budget reconciliation.
The House bill will have to change. But muddling the matter even more is the fact that it can’t change too much. The Senate version has to pass the House again, and House GOP leaders are already warning that major changes won’t be an easy sell.
“It will have to be tracked fairly closely, obviously, with the House bill, because they had a very fragile majority and struck a very delicate balance in getting it passed in the House in the first place,” Thune said Monday. “But there are some things that senators want.”
But once again, senators are counting on Trump to be the difference-maker. Senate Republicans can only afford to lose three votes before Vice President JD Vance would need to break a tie; four GOP “no” votes would tank the bill altogether.
“It’ll be a John McCain sort of moment for somebody, perhaps,” Cramer said, referring to the late Sen. John McCain’s vote against overturning Obamacare in 2017. “And the question then becomes whether they go ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’ I really can see it going that way. And at that point, the last couple of holdouts will have leverage and Donald Trump will have a hand to play.”
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Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. John T. Seward, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.