Today’s notice: World’s Greatest Deliberative Body time. The MAHA moment. “Stupid” is as stupid does. Fans of green energy are bummed.
Is the Senate Going to Be Different?
The Senate reconciliation fight is another chance for Republicans to argue over priorities they want to, well, prioritize. The party’s prioritizer in chief, Donald Trump, is ready to engage the chamber but may need a different set of skills if he wants to be The Closer again.
Trump’s reliable threat of a primary? “It’s just not going to work. It works in the House, it doesn’t work here,” Sen. Ron Johnson told NOTUS. Johnson said he wants the president to “get serious about the return to pre-pandemic-level spending, which he’s not yet.”
Trending
Some of the loudest skeptics of spending cuts in the House were blue state Republicans without a ton of MAGA clout. That’s not true in the Senate, where Josh Hawley was telling reporters Thursday the president had personally told him “don’t cut Medicaid” and to consider closing the carried interest loophole.
One thing that is exactly the same: Every Republican wants Trump closely involved to bring every other Republican around. A White House official told NOTUS that Trump’s approach would be similar in the Senate. “Everyone feels confident about where this is heading,” the official said.
Are there lessons from the House fight Hawley will be applying to his effort to win the battle of priorities? “The Senate’s a very different place,” he told us when we asked. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
On the Democratic side, things look pretty similar: The opposition is doing their best to make the reconciliation fight one where they win elections.
Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he hoped Republicans would tank the bill, but if they don’t, passage makes it more likely Democrats win Senate seats in 2026. Already the bill “has put a stamp on who this Republican Party is,” Schumer said on a call hosted by the group Families Over Billionaires. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made a similar argument in the wee hours of the morning before the House vote.
That vote could be “the day Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representatives,” Jeffries said.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro and Margaret Manto | Read more on the Senate’s pivot to reconciliation.
Is This the Week MAHA Was Waiting For?
It’s been a tough week to be a COVID-19 vaccine. Ever since Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation, there has been an open question about just how much “Make America Healthy Again” medicine would find its way into the traditional health science administered by HHS.
This week, we are getting the answer — and it’s more than many mainstream scientists feared and more than the vaccine skeptics dreamed.
Kennedy’s promises during his confirmation hearings that he wouldn’t do anything to alter access to immunizations for those who want them has fizzled into a restrictive ruling from the Food and Drug Administration on the future use of a COVID booster. There’s also new rules about how booster shots will be tested moving forward. “The era of rubber-stamping COVID boosters is over,” Kennedy wrote Wednesday on X.
The MAHA Commission report released yesterday also doubles down on Kennedy’s long-held philosophy that corporate influence on the federal health system has led to an overmedicalization of children.
The president of the MAHA Institute, Leland Lehrman, told me at a hearing about the purported risks of the COVID shots this week that he’s feeling “very optimistic about all of the work that’s happening.”
It was not always clear it was going to go this way. As recently as a couple weeks ago, RFK Jr. was being accused of breaking his promises by his 2024 running mate Nicole Shanahan, who claimed someone was “regularly controlling his decisions” after he supported Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general. Among the MAHA knocks on nominee Casey Means is that she has said relatively little against vaccines.
But at the end of a busy week for MAGA, it’s clear MAHA is going to have a seat at the table. “Kennedy’s done more in the past 100 days than other people want to do in their entire lives,” Mary Holland, president of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, told me.
—Margaret Manto | Read more on the MAHA Commission report.
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.
- Language service cutbacks raise fear of medical errors, misdiagnoses, deaths, by Vanessa G. Sánchez and Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez for the San Francisco Chronicle
- Bakery Owner Wins a Free Speech Fight About Doughnuts, by Ginger Adams Otis for The Wall Street Journal
- Democratic Hill staffer is a contestant on next season of ‘Survivor,’ by Ali Bianco for Politico
The Ballad of Andy Harris
Rep. Andy Harris, the Freedom Caucus’ chair, was on the receiving end of a particularly colorful Trump tirade over his reluctance to get on board with the reconciliation bill, sources who were briefed on the meeting told NOTUS.
“You’re stupid if you vote against this bill,” Trump told Harris, according to one source.
That exchange is in NOTUS’ Hill team’s latest: A look at how Speaker Mike Johnson put his “big, beautiful bill” back on track, with Trump’s help wrangling reluctant Freedom Caucus members.
Jeanine Pirro’s Past
Jeanine Pirro was Trump’s replacement pick for the job of U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia after his first choice, Ed Martin, appeared unlikely to make it through the Senate confirmation process.
But a controversy during Pirro’s time as a New York suburban district attorney that put her prosecutorial impartiality into question could threaten her prospects too, NOTUS’ Jose Pagliery reports, should Trump decide to make her nomination official.
Who’s Got the Power
As they watched the House reconciliation bill come together over the past few weeks, leaders in the clean energy industry say they are expecting the Senate to curtail the biggest cuts found in the House text — and are pushing very hard to make that happen.
A number of Republican senators shared their concerns and support restoring subsidies, NOTUS’ Emily Kennard and Anna Kramer report. But the cuts “were made at the insistence of the most conservative bloc in the House,” they write, meaning any curtailing efforts by senators could just get snarled up in the House again.
Meanwhile, it’s been a roller-coaster week for fans of wind energy, NOTUS’ Shifra Dayak reports. The administration lifted a stop-work order on a high-profile wind power project in New York. But then the House passed its reconciliation text, which “makes sweeping changes to the structure of tax credits available to wind developers.”
Read more on the industry’s leverage. | Read more on the changes to wind power.
Front Page
- Democrats Want to Force Republicans to Vote on Whether They’re OK With Trump’s Memecoin Activity: Senate Republicans need Democratic votes to pass the GENIUS Act.
- Karoline Leavitt Says Trump Wants Republican Holdouts to Be Primaried: Reps. Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson voted “no” on the reconciliation bill.
- Senate Overturns California’s Electric Vehicle Mandate in Defiance of Parliamentarian: “The effort here is to ensure that you’re not overruling the parliamentarian,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said.
Be Social
Only the strongest M&Ms for Virginia Foxx.
https://x.com/virginiafoxx/status/1925562494774337887?s=46
Have a Tip? Email Us.
Reach us at tips@notus.org. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our newsletter at newsletters@notus.org.
Correction: Due to a production error, the Thursday edition of the NOTUS newsletter included a module about a provision in the reconciliation bill eliminating a tax on tanning beds. The provision was removed from the bill.
Thank you for reading! If you like this edition of the NOTUS newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If this newsletter was shared with you, please subscribe (it’s free!).
Authors
