After the Senate spent less than 48 hours in session, senators left town for the week on Wednesday with more questions than answers on their reconciliation bill.
With a self-imposed Fourth of July deadline for passing the reconciliation package fast approaching, Republicans are hoping some time away from the Capitol for a Juneteenth mini-recess can help senators break through some major sticking points.
After all, Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he plans to put the bill — a bill which doesn’t even fully exist yet — on the floor next week.
“To get it done by the Fourth of July, we need to start on it next week,” Thune told reporters Wednesday. He added that the process probably wouldn’t start next Monday, but said it could start soon after.
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“Hopefully mid-week,” Thune said.
If all goes according to plan, a mid-week start would give lawmakers just enough time to get through a likely all-night vote-a-rama on amendments and passage by the end of the week, perhaps with some rollover into the weekend.
After that, the bill would have to go back to the House for passage — meaning House lawmakers could very well be called back into town during their scheduled July 4 recess for the sake of getting the bill to the president’s desk by Independence Day.
But for the timeline to work out, there can be hardly any hiccups on a bill that no one has fully seen.
“We want to have some language out by the beginning of next week, so that way we have the vote-a-rama towards the end of next week,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said. “If not, we’re going to be here throughout the weekend.”
In the Senate, where Thursday departures are practically sacred, nobody wants to be in through the weekend, particularly during a week of holiday recess.
The plan, however, is dependent on GOP leaders convincing a number of Senate Republicans to stomach their objections to the bill. Only three Senate Republicans can vote “no” on the measure before the legislation would officially fail on the floor, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a 50-50 tie. Right now, the number of lawmakers with concerns on the bill is far higher.
Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Josh Hawley and others have concerns about proposed Medicaid cuts. Sens. Ron Johnson, Rick Scott and Mike Lee have concerns over spending levels. Sen. Rand Paul has objections to a debt-limit increase being included in the bill. And in a Senate Republican Conference of 53 members, there’s always a handful of more private, more parochial objections to a piece of legislation that basically represents President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, for instance, is against a ban on states regulating artificial intelligence that’s currently included in the bill.
“There’s so much to the bill, and I want to please the president, too,” said Sen. Jim Justice, who has concerns about changes to the provider tax, a state-imposed fee that helps fund a state’s portion of Medicaid. But, he said, “when it really boils right down to it, you may have to hold your nose on some things that you just absolutely don’t like, because we can’t like everything.”
Hawley is also concerned about the bill’s proposal to lower the state provider-tax cap, with concerns that doing so could hurt rural hospitals in particular. The senator said there are a number of possible solutions.
“They could do a fund for rural hospitals,” Hawley said. “They could do a moratorium. They could do a carve-out.”
At the moment, Hawley said he doesn’t think GOP leadership has the 51 votes necessary to pass the bill in the upper chamber. Reconciliation is a rare loophole in the Senate that allows lawmakers to pass budget-related bills via a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote threshold the filibuster usually requires.
Hawley is one those votes Senate leadership could very well need to get the bill across the finish line. He told reporters that getting him to a “yes” vote really shouldn’t be that hard.
“They could get me to ‘yes’ today if they would come forward and say, ‘OK, fine, here’s what we’re gonna do,’” he said. “‘We’re gonna fix this. We’re gonna fix this text, or we’re gonna do this in rural hospitals.’”
But even that provision alone is evidence of how far negotiations need to go.
When NOTUS asked Mullin whether there was sign of a compromise number on the provider tax, he said senators were “going to find one.”
“You guys have heard me say this like a broken record 1000 times,” Mullin said. “Everything’s on the table. And we want to get to a good landing place that can get 51 here — well, 50 plus JD — and again, whatever the magic number is in the House.”
When a reporter pressed that, at some point, those options have to narrow, Mullin simply replied: “They’re narrowing.”
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Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.
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