The White House is wasting no time in trying to persuade Republican senators to back the reconciliation bill, using a full-court press strategy even before the legislation is actually written in the Senate.
As the GOP’s self-imposed deadline of Fourth of July recess rapidly approaches, the White House and President Donald Trump’s early intervention may be exactly what lawmakers need to jump-start the slow negotiations.
With so many issues unresolved, the only thing Republicans seem to have consensus on is that they should produce a reconciliation bill that extends the expiring tax rates.
As Senate Majority Leader John Thune said of the bill Tuesday, “Failure’s not an option.”
Trump is already working the phones to talk through objections to the bill. He spoke with holdout Sen. Josh Hawley, who’s against the Medicaid cuts in the House-passed bill, as recently as Tuesday morning. Hawley also told NOTUS he visited Vice President JD Vance’s office just a few days ago.
Vance also visited the Hill on Tuesday, meeting with holdout Sen. Ron Johnson, who wants more cuts.
Johnson said his main message to Vance was, “As much as I want to support the president, as much as I appreciate all the good elements in the ‘one big, beautiful bill,’ if we don’t have that second bite at the apple, if we don’t have a must-pass second piece of reconciliation this Congress, I mean, voting for that would just basically accept this as a new normal.”
“And that’s something I can’t do,” Johnson said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also joined the beginning of Tuesday’s House GOP conference meeting at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s headquarters to pitch messaging. She focused specifically on the reconciliation bill’s wins — as opposed to the areas of conflict — in an apparent effort to give the languishing legislation a positive spin.
“The One, Big, Beautiful Bill is a presidential priority that 80 million Americans voted for in November,” Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, said. “We will continue reminding House & Senate members that their voters endorsed this historic piece of legislation and now it’s time to deliver.”
At their weekly lunch meeting, Senate Republicans were also shown polling on the reconciliation bill detailing policies that are messaging wins.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin said the conversation was one of the best the conference has had in a while. As for whether it moved the needle on moving the bill forward, he told reporters the polling notes certainly helped.
“Polling was good,” Mullin said. “It talked really about where the American people are, some concerns that we had. There’s a lot of unknowns. So we started unpacking the bill, it helped. Of course, we’re going to unpack it again tomorrow, too.”
Hawley said his takeaways from the polling was that “what the public really wants and needs is working-class tax cuts.”
“That’s by far the most popular thing,” he said. “It’s child tax credit — people love that, and they love it because they need it. It’s ‘no taxes on tips,’ ‘no taxes on overtime.’”
It’s all evidence that the White House is eager to get involved in stalled reconciliation talks — something many congressional Republicans predicted would be necessary to get the bill across the finish line.
Not only are Senate Republicans struggling to come up with a version of the bill they can all agree with — by July 4, no less — but they’re also facing competing calls from House Republicans to either change or keep the existing bill’s framework.
While the House Freedom Caucus on Monday wrote a letter to Senate Republicans asking them to inject a fresh batch of spending cuts into the legislation, a separate group of House Republicans are asking them to tread lightly.
“We urge Senate leadership to keep the reconciliation measure compatible with the House framework while seizing every opportunity to deepen savings,” read a letter to Thune from Rep. Lloyd Smucker and 37 other House Republicans. “Doing so will deliver lasting tax relief, stronger growth, and a more responsible budget for the American people.”
House Republicans aren’t the only group urging Senate Republicans to be careful.
As part of these talks, the White House is drawing a line in the proverbial sand on Trump’s signature campaign promises in the bill, as senators consider watering down what they deem “nongrowth” provisions like “no tax on tips” or “no tax on overtime.”
“The president’s tax priorities are nonnegotiable,” Leavitt told NOTUS on Tuesday. “The American people reelected Republicans to enact the Trump agenda and the president is counting on them to do it.”
It’s not exactly a warning, as the White House knows that the bill is still in negotiations. But the White House has seen that there’s been talks about scaling back some of the tax provisions, and the administration is trying to dissuade senators from going any further with those discussions.
“They know where the White House stands and the president stands on these — on these key priorities, they have to be in the bill,” Leavitt said.
Thune on Tuesday said the Senate is keeping the sensitivity of the president’s tax provisions in mind, particularly given how much Trump campaigns on things like “no tax on tips” and “no taxes on overtime.”
“Obviously they were big priorities for the president, and as you said, things he campaigned on,” Thune told reporters Tuesday morning. “So I would expect to see a number of those campaign commitments adhered to in the legislation.”
But the big questions remain.
All along, the House and Senate have been gearing up for a showdown over Medicaid cuts. And that question is still up in the air.
Hawley and Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have presented themselves as the biggest obstacles to significant Medicaid cuts. And with Sen. Rand Paul appearing ungettable on the bill as long as it raises the debt ceiling by $4 trillion — something that continues to be a priority for Trump and Republican leaders — one of those three Republicans will have to crack.
The White House’s engagement with Hawley may be an indication that officials think he’s the most likely to ultimately come along, though Hawley could endanger the bill’s passage simply by insisting on reining in some of the cuts that House conservatives fought to include.
Before Hawley agreed to support the Senate’s budget resolution setting up reconciliation, he extracted a promise from Trump that Medicaid cuts wouldn’t be part of the final bill. But with the House seeming intractable on whether those cuts will be part of the package, something has got to give.
“The Senate will be a lot like the House,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told NOTUS last week. “It’s going to be a very narrow margin. The last votes can be hard to get.”
—
Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS.
Jasmine Wright and Daniella Diaz, who are reporters at NOTUS, contributed to this report. Helen Huiskes and Shifra Dayak, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.