It’s another make-or-break week for Senate Republicans scrambling to pass their reconciliation bill.
Republicans say they want to have a bill ready next week. With Thursday and Friday off for Juneteenth, that gives them essentially three legislative days to work out a whole menu of obstacles.
Still at issue: How much of the House’s cuts to Medicaid will Senate moderates tolerate? Will the negotiated $40,000 ceiling to the state and local tax deduction (SALT) survive the scrutiny of spending hawks who want to see more savings? Will the Senate meet President Donald Trump’s demands in full for an influx of funding for border security? Will the many policy provisions in the House bill — and those the Senate wants to add — make it past the parliamentarian and the strict rules of reconciliation, which require every measure in the bill to be related to revenue or spending?
Getting a Senate bill turned around soon, one that can actually pass the House, and sending it to Trump’s desk in July would be a crucial if difficult win for Republicans and President Donald Trump, who hasn’t been able to get much of anything through Congress to this point.
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Even critics of the bill think it’s vital to get something.
“I think working people voted for Donald Trump. They trust him. They want to see Republicans deliver,” Sen. Josh Hawley told reporters last week. “We have to deliver something.”
But as always with Congress, that task is easier said than done. Comprehensive text of the bill is yet to be released. The Senate Finance Committee’s portion — which includes provisions on Medicaid cuts and taxes — has still not been released, despite reports that a portion would come out on Friday.
Senate Homeland Security Chair Rand Paul and Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham have also been pushing competing visions of the bill’s funding for border security and immigration enforcement.
And on the House side, both conservatives and more moderate Republicans have been making demands on the Senate, with conservatives saying senators should go further with spending cuts and other House Republicans advising their counterparts not to touch the SALT provisions.
If it sounds like the House can’t agree on the direction of the bill — even after already passing a version — it’s a similar story with the Senate.
“I don’t want to criticize what has been done,” Sen. Ron Johnson, another critic of the bill, said last week. “I want to support what’s been done, but I absolutely can’t accept this to be normal. We need another bite in the apple.”
Congressional GOP leadership, however, doesn’t seem interested in taking another bite. While Hill Republicans could certainly have another shot at reconciliation in a new fiscal year, so long as they hold on to both chambers’ majorities, there’s a shot clock on finishing this rendition.
The U.S. debt limit is reportedly poised to hit between August and September. Going over that cliff would have catastrophic consequences for the global economy. And yet, there’s no backup plan.
“There is no Plan B,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on the debt limit last week. “We have to get it done.”
If Trump’s recent Truth Social posts are any indication, he’s not looking to delay passage any longer, either.
“THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL WILL GROW THE ECONOMY LIKE IT HAS NEVER GROWN BEFORE,” Trump wrote in a post last week. “AT THE SAME TIME, IT IS CUTTING EXPENSES BY 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS. IT PUTS OUR COUNTRY ON THE RIGHT TRACK, PLUS! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Trump’s public hand-wringing has gone a long way toward getting the bill this far. He visited House Republicans prior to passage — and personally lobbied them — and since the bill has hit the Senate, his White House staff has hit Capitol Hill to sell the legislation.
Just last week, Vice President JD Vance, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt all visited the Capitol to make the case to potential holdouts.
And holdouts, there are many.
About a half-dozen senators are voicing opposition either because the bill cuts too much — particularly regarding Medicaid and food assistance programs — or cuts too little and doesn’t have enough of an impact on the federal deficit.
To boot, that’s all before the Senate parliamentarian has her say. The parliamentarian is expected to nix a number of extraneous provisions in the bill that are not closely aligned enough to the federal budget to qualify for the reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to bypass the filibuster in the Senate.
Those deliberations with the parliamentarian are currently underway. And even Thune expects some Republican provisions will lose out.
“When the House sends it over, they don’t have the restrictions that we have to comply with here,” Thune said at a press conference last week. “And so my expectation is there perhaps will be some things that won’t survive the Byrd test, the Byrd bath here in the Senate, but we obviously are going to fight very, very hard on all those issues and make our arguments in front of the parliamentarian.”
He wouldn’t place bets on what those provisions might be, despite widespread suspicions about elements of the bill like banning states from regulating artificial intelligence, or broadening congressional reach into agency rulemaking, won’t stand.
Still, Thune said the hope is to keep the bill as closely aligned with the House’s portion as possible. At this point, with just days to spare on the GOP’s desired July 4 timeline, that might be necessary.
Changing the bill substantially would only further complicate passage in the House — and risk days or even weeks of negotiations.
“The Democrats when they had the House, Senate, White House, unified control of government, they dramatically expanded the scope of what’s eligible for consideration under reconciliation” Thune said. “And so we’re using that template, and we’re going to push as hard as we can for the priorities that the House included, in hopes that we can have a bill at the end that preserves as much of the much of the work that the House did as possible.”
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS.
Shifra Dayak and John T. Seward, who are NOTUS reporters and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.
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