House Republicans painstakingly crafted a reconciliation bill that could hold different factions of the GOP conference together, delicately balancing the demands of conservatives with vulnerable Republicans from blue states. The Senate is about to disregard all of that.
Despite those months of careful negotiations in the House, Republicans in the upper chamber are already signaling they will rewrite large components of the bill, sending a new package back to the House for more debate and another uphill climb toward passage.
Sen. Ted Cruz said he expects “considerable changes in the Senate.” Or, as Sen. Thom Tillis put it, “It’s a good start, but we have work to do.”
It’s not yet clear yet whether there will be committee markups or just backroom changes in the Senate. Senate Budget Committee chair Lindsey Graham said on Thursday that he still needed to talk with Majority Leader John Thune about that question.
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Thune has previously said there could be markups, but he hasn’t been definitive. He told reporters on Thursday that, while the House “gave us a good product to work with,” there are senators “who want to write our own bill.”
That much is clear.
Several senators are demanding a nearly complete overhaul, and the bill will require at least 50 votes to pass. (Democrats are very likely to be unanimously against it.) That means Senate Republicans can only lose three votes before Vice President JD Vance would have to break a tie. Four Republican “no” votes and reconciliation falls apart.
At stake is the overwhelming bulk of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, including massive tax, energy, border and health care provisions. The individual tax rates passed during Trump’s first term expire later this year, and the government is due to reach its statutory debt limit sometime this summer. The reconciliation bill seeks to address both issues.
But Sen. Rand Paul, the chamber’s biggest deficit hawk, has said he won’t vote for the reconciliation measure as written, particularly not if a debt limit increase is part of it.
“I think the problem is, for conservatives, is they lose their high moral ground,” Paul said of voting for the bill. “These will be their deficits. Everything’s ‘Biden spending, Biden deficits.’ These will be GOP spending bills, GOP deficits, and there’s no change in the direction of the country.”
At the moment, Paul isn’t alone. Sen. Ron Johnson is also a “no,” citing debt and spending concerns. Johnson also thinks the bill should be broken up into multiple parts. Senate Republicans writ large were originally pushing for two separate reconciliation bills, but lost that battle when Trump pushed for “one big, beautiful bill.”
“I want to see this succeed, but we have to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,” Johnson said, “and have a process to achieve and maintain that. That’s a line-by-line review, forensic audit of federal spending.”
Johnson added that at least three other Republican senators — Paul, Mike Lee and Rick Scott — share his concerns. Right now, that’d be enough to stop the bill from passing.
Scott certainly didn’t seem a fan of the House bill, telling NOTUS he wants to “balance the budget.”
“I balanced the budget as a governor, balance the budget in my personal life, you balance your budget. Your federal government ought to be doing the same thing,” he said.
But those four are almost certainly not the only problems for Republican leaders. Moderate Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have voiced their own reservations about Medicaid changes in the bill, among other issues. Both women have shown a willingness to step out of line this term on Trump priorities they disagree with, despite backlash.
Even conservatives who might broadly be on board with the bill say they need to see major adjustments. Sen. Josh Hawley has concerns about changes to Medicaid. Trump, at a meeting with House Republicans last week, instructed lawmakers not to “fuck around with Medicaid.”
Before Hawley agreed to support the Senate’s budget resolution in April, he extracted a promise from Trump not to substantially cut Medicaid. And Hawley said he spoke with the president shortly before the House passed its version of the bill and feels they’re in alignment.
Trump was essential in getting the reconciliation bill across the finish line in the House. His visit to House Republicans was one of several check-ins. And the president has already bolstered primary threats against the two House Republicans who voted against the bill’s final passage: Reps. Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson.
But senators may be much harder to strong-arm, as their term limits are longer and they have more leeway to push back, which Sen. Johnson has already recognized.
To be sure, Trump will still be whipping Senate Republicans as best he can. Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS everyone should “expect calls” this week.
But some of the House’s most hard-fought provisions may not be as big of a deal in the upper chamber. The House negotiated heavily over the state and local tax — with a critical contingent of New York Republicans refusing to support the package without an increase to the SALT deduction cap.
Senators recognize Speaker Mike Johnson had to strike a balance, and the speaker visited a Senate GOP lunch this week to explain as much.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said the speaker described negotiating the bill in the House as “trying to walk across the Grand Canyon on dental floss.”
Still, in the Senate, details like a SALT cap increase aren’t as important. States with the highest demands for SALT changes — New York, New Jersey and California chief among them — are entirely represented by Democrats in the upper chamber. That means the House’s decision to quadruple the SALT deduction from $10,000 to $40,000 could be met with opposition, particularly as Senate conservatives look for ways to address the bottom line.
“No Senate member has the kind of concerns about SALT tax that the House has, and that the speaker has to deal with,” Barrasso said.
And while senators are aware that their legislation also has to pass the House, it already seems unlikely that the Senate’s SALT deduction will be as generous as the House’s, that the Medicaid cuts will be as steep, and that many of the smaller policy demands House Republicans liked will survive the Senate’s stricter reconciliation rules.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have set a July 4 deadline for passage, about a month before the United States is expected to hit the debt limit.
If lawmakers delay much beyond August, they may be forced to raise the debt ceiling in separate legislation, likely on a bipartisan basis.
Ironically, removing the $4 trillion debt limit increase could be the key to getting the bill through the Senate, if it means conservatives like Paul would back the legislation.
The issue is — with only three votes to spare — Paul can’t be a “no” vote if Collins, Murkowski and Hawley are steadfast in not backing a bill that has substantial Medicaid cuts. (The House legislation cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid over a decade, and it’d be difficult to pass the legislation in the House if it were shorn of most of those cuts.)
It’s also difficult to imagine the Senate’s conservatives getting on board with a bill that simply extends tax rates and doesn’t meaningfully touch Medicaid.
Something has to give.
For now, senators are content to enjoy their Memorial Day break and hear from constituents on the House-passed legislation — something that House GOP lawmakers weren’t really able to do because of the speed with which they passed their bill.
Tuberville told NOTUS that Senate Republicans were just happy to finally have text.
“We’ll have a week to look at it, and read it, go through it and talk to our constituents about it back home,” he said.
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Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Em Luetkemeyer is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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