Senate Republicans are sprinting to advance their reconciliation bill on Saturday, but even if they can clear the procedural hurdles to bring the sprawling legislation to the floor, it’s not clear Majority Leader John Thune has the votes to actually pass it.
As he put it to reporters on Friday afternoon, a midday Saturday vote, at this point, is “aspirational.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Thune said when asked if he had the votes.
Rulings from the Senate parliamentarian are trickling out daily, sending sections of the bill back to the drawing board. But while the drip, drip of procedural decisions is slowing progress on the bill, President Donald Trump’s July 4 deadline is rapidly approaching, with the administration doing everything it can to muscle the bill through Congress on that timeline.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin said the conference “is close” to being ready to vote, but many senators are waiting to see the bill text and how much it will actually save before deciding how they’ll vote.
Mullin said he thinks his colleagues would be able to decide whether they support the final bill “after we get these next numbers out for them that are real number hawks — which I consider most of us are.” He added, “They see the numbers for themselves and the proof is in the pudding that we’ve made some significant cuts.”
Multiple senators coming out of GOP lunch on Friday told reporters they expected bill text to come out in the evening. What that text says on a range of thorny issues — in light of the parliamentarian’s rulings and weeks of negotiations — will determine how smooth its passage will be.
“We think we’ve got it,” Sen. John Hoeven told reporters after lunch, referring to a fix for the provider tax cap that Republicans in both chambers have been arguing over all week. He said on this and other negotiated issues, he’s expecting clarity on what the bill will actually say by Friday night.
Senators are now bracing for a procedural vote as early as midday Saturday, setting up an all-night voting session, allowing the upper chamber to send the bill to the House by Monday night. The House took its last vote for the week on Friday morning and is waiting on the Senate to announce its next move.
“It’s possible,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters when asked if the July 4 deadline would slip. “But I don’t want to even accept that as an option right now.”
But Senate Republicans have enough disagreement within their ranks still that a Saturday procedural vote, or at least a successful one, is looking shaky.
“If the baseline doesn’t change, I’m a ‘no,’” Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters, apparently referring to the upper chamber’s use of current policy baseline, a method of measuring the fiscal ramifications of the bill.
Sen. Rand Paul also reiterated that he will not vote for the bill so long as an increase to the debt limit remains in the legislation.
“I’m willing to vote for the bill if you get rid of the debt ceiling,” Paul told reporters Friday. “But the thing is, the bill is not going to fix our deficit problem. I think it makes our deficit problem worse.”
However, in a potential saving grace for Thune, the parliamentarian ruled against a proposed adjustment to the provider tax in the Senate version of the bill. That proposed language sparked huge debate among Republicans, with several members of the GOP conference concerned about how it would impact health care in rural areas. By the parliamentarian nixing the provision, there might be an excuse to just not include it at all.
Hoeven told reporters after lunch that a new plan, now under review by the parliamentarian, involves an initial freeze of the cap, but not for at least a year, followed by a decrease.
That, plus a multi-billion dollar fund for rural hospitals — which are poised to face funding losses from the provider tax changes — “may help satisfy” the members in both chambers who had been up in arms about protecting rural hospitals from the impact of the bill’s Medicaid cuts, Hoeven said.
Another critical disagreement in the conference across chambers is the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, which a handful of House Republicans from wealthy blue states negotiated to a $40,000 cap. The Senate doesn’t have similar Republican stakeholders, and leadership has struggled to justify the costly tax cut that would disproportionately benefit Democratic states.
Senate fiscal hawks, like Sen. Ron Johnson, have been eager to eliminate the House’s SALT cap, returning it to the current $10,000. But, if House SALT proponents are to be believed, they are prepared to sink the entire reconciliation bill if the Senate interferes.
Further complicating passage this weekend is that Republican senators still have a litany of smaller pet issues that they are hoping to squeeze into the package, from the proposed sale of public lands for housing development to an AI moratorium that would ban states from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years.
For plenty of senators speaking to reporters Friday, the to-do list for the next two days isn’t just sounding aspirational — it’s sounding nearly impossible.
Sen. Johnson told reporters before the conference lunch on Friday that he doesn’t think the Senate is “ready” to vote within 24-48 hours.
“I hope they don’t do that,” he said.
And if Senate Republican leadership does tick everything off, senators are gearing up for a grueling weekend.
“I’m guessing they won’t start the process till the evening,” Paul speculated to reporters, “because they play the charade of making everybody really ornery, tired, you know, and then they start.”
—
Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.
Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS.