Senate GOP leaders have just days left if they want to meet their self-imposed July 4 deadline for reconciliation.
They’ll have to start flipping votes — fast.
There are more than a half-dozen Republican senators with open objections to the bill, which has still not yet been fully written or publicly released. Only three Republicans can vote “no” before the bill fails, and that’s with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie.
Some holdouts have clear lines in the sand — most notably, Sen. Rand Paul, who’s explicitly said he will not vote for the bill if an increase to the debt limit is included.
At the moment, a debt limit increase is part of the bill, and there are no other objectors to that provision in the Senate, giving GOP leadership little reason to take it out.
“If they were to strip the debt ceiling off, there’s a lot of things I would vote for,” Paul said earlier this month. “I would vote to keep the 2017 tax cuts. I would vote to keep them permanent. I think there should be more spending cuts. But even an imperfect bill, I would still support if I didn’t have to vote to raise the debt ceiling $5 trillion.”
Republican leaders — though not necessarily President Donald Trump — seem to have largely written off Paul, assuming he will oppose the reconciliation package. That leaves Republicans with just two more GOP lawmakers who could vote “no.” And every change they make to the bill will be targeted at flipping votes, while also not losing any Republican who currently supports the legislation.
There are a handful of Republicans objecting to proposed Medicaid cuts in the bill, including lowering the provider tax cap, which is a state-imposed fee that helps states fund their share of Medicaid. That group’s redlines, and what it would take to get them to vote “yes,” are more opaque.
The most mentioned Medicaid objectors are Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Josh Hawley, but they’re not alone. West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, for instance, has said he’d be hesitant to cut too deeply into Medicaid or the provider tax, citing its impact on rural hospitals.
“I’ve got major concerns,” Justice said last week. “I mean, that’s all there’s to it. Because in the state of West Virginia, especially, you know, and I know it’ll be all across our nation, but our rural hospitals are going to have a tough time. That’s all there’s to it, a really tough time, and they depend on this.”
Justice, like others, wouldn’t explicitly say whether he’s a “yes” or “no” on the bill. Given the math, there’s hardly any scenario where Justice could oppose the legislation and the bill would pass. If Justice is a no, it becomes all the more plausible that Republicans like Collins and Murkowski would be, too.
While Hawley has arguably been the most outspoken Republican on Medicaid cuts, he’s found ways to talk positively about the bill as of late. On Fox News last week, he said even though he’s nervous the bill could hurt rural hospitals, he’s glad there are “no Medicaid benefit cuts.”
“That’s good. That’s what the president said,” Hawley added, continuing that “the most important thing” in the bill is “the big, beautiful tax cuts for working people.”
Then, there are the conservative objectors. Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rick Scott have all expressed reservations about the overall cost of the reconciliation bill. At times, their rhetoric has fluctuated between harshly negative and cautiously optimistic. But they’ve maintained that they feel current spending levels in the bill are too high — and they want cuts.
“The deficit will eat us alive if we don’t get it under control,” Lee posted on X last week. “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
And these are just the public objections. What people are concerned about behind closed doors can always be another story. But any handful of these Republicans could choose to hold their ground and vote against the bill, which basically encompasses Trump’s entire legislative agenda for the first year of his presidency. The White House has maintained it wants the bill on the president’s desk by the Fourth of July.
“Republicans in Congress have a mandate to deliver,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing Thursday. “President Trump demands they send this historic bill to his desk for signature by Independence Day.”
Getting holdouts on board is only one part of the equation for a finished product.
The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is in the midst of delivering decisions on whether the provisions in each committee’s draft of their portion of the bill are compliant with Senate rules, which require every reconciliation provision to be budget-related.
So far, MacDonough has nixed several provisions. Those cuts include a section of the bill that would have put a funding cap on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a cost-sharing plan for SNAP benefits between states and the federal government, and a provision that would limit the ability of judges to issue injunctions or temporary restraining orders against the federal government.
But one controversial provision — which would place a 10-year moratorium on states regulating artificial intelligence — survived the parliamentarian’s review. It will still face steep opposition in the Senate, where both Hawley and Sen. Marsha Blackburn have said they want the provision stripped out.
That process, of Senate aides meeting with the parliamentarian to argue for and against certain provisions in each draft as she decides on them, is informally called a “Byrd bath,” referring to the reconciliation rule former Sen. Robert Byrd authored in 1974, constraining the scope of reconciliation provisions. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Thursday that he hoped the Byrd bath would be wrapped up by this week.
“I think we’re making good headway,” Thune said. “And I would say that these meetings right now are on the major provisions in tax and health. We have sort of pre-litigated a lot of that. But there are a lot of the other provisions in the bill, chapters in the bill, that are still subject to going through the Byrd bath.”
All the negotiating will likely culminate in an all-night Senate voting session full of amendments, once the bill is brought to the floor. And then, even once a Senate version passes, the House will have to take the legislation up again for final passage before it goes to Trump’s desk.
Thune and Republican leaders still want to get everything done before the Senate leaves for its July 4 recess, which is slated to start Friday. Despite that deadline looming, Vance said last week he’s still feeling good about the Senate’s timeline. After all, the Senate has a full slate of other legislative issues to deal with this summer, including a rescissions package, Trump’s tariffs and government funding, which is set to expire at the end of September.
“They’ve got some, you know, obviously some things they’re going to work through as a natural part of the legislative process,” Vance said after exiting a Senate GOP lunch last week. He’s one of several White House figures to attend Senate GOP lunches in recent weeks in an effort to sway holdouts.
Vance added that he was “very gratified and optimistic” about where negotiations stand.
“So I think we’re going to be able to get this thing passed and get on with the next step of the president’s agenda,” he said.
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Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.