Senate Republicans rallied to send President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ back to the House, notching a major victory in their record-shattering march toward getting the legislation signed into law.
Nearly every Republican in the upper chamber coalesced to advance Trump’s $3.3 trillion megabill, save for Sens.Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Rand Paul, R-Ky, and Susan Collins, R-Maine. No Senate Democrat crossed the aisle to support the bill.
Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote was needed to push the bill across the finish line – unlike on Saturday, when the Ohio Republican descended on Capitol Hill in anticipation of a tight vote to proceed with debate on the bill.
That comes after Republican leadership tried to win over the votes of Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, with sweeteners in the final, amended version of the bill.
The bill now heads to the House, where fiscal hawks in the House Freedom Caucus are frustrated with what they say are shallow spending cuts, and moderates are concerned over cuts to Medicaid. All have warned that they may not support the bill.
Still, Republican leaders have made clear that they intend to have the bill on Trump’s desk by Friday.
Many House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called on the Senate to change as little as possible. A product that could pass the House was front of mind for some Senate Republicans as the day dragged on.
‘We’re talking to the House,’ Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said. ‘We know they’re going to have some issues over there, just like we had some issues when it came over here, too. But we think we’re going to pass a bill that they can pass.’
House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, the chief tax writer in the House, said he was ‘optimistic’ about the bill on his way to the Senate floor Tuesday morning.
‘We’re moving to the point that we’re getting more balance, and what I’ve said all along is let’s have balance in the bill,’ the Missouri Republican said. ‘We’re going to get this done, we’re going to get this to the president by July 4.’
Republicans pushed the chamber from the end of June to the beginning of July after a marathon weekend that saw a high drama unfold on the Senate floor, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., bleed time, hours of mostly one-sided debate, the occasional protest in the Senate gallery, a grueling blast of amendments and the penultimate vote to move the ball forward for the president’s ambitious agenda.
The blur from Monday to Tuesday, like the weekend slog before it, was not without its own dramatics.
Senate Democrats tried numerous times to shelve the legislation during the ‘vote-a-rama,’ while Republicans sought to revive certain measures that were scrapped – like provisions that would have booted illegal immigrants from Medicaid – or amendments to sate key Republican holdouts.
And before the bill was put on the floor for a final vote, last-minute deals were struck and changes made in a ‘wraparound’ amendment to attract holdouts.
Included was the doubling of the rural hospital fund to $50 billion, which was pushed by Collins, and a rollback of the start date of supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) work requirements for states with higher payment error rates, like Alaska.
Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ is crammed with his and congressional Republicans’ legislative priorities, including billions for the Pentagon and to bolster the White House’s border and immigration agenda, the permanent extension of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, deep spending cuts and an effort to reform Medicaid.
Senate Republicans have pitched the bill as a way to both turbocharge the economy and as a means to prevent Trump’s first-term tax cuts from expiring. They have simultaneously used it as a vehicle to achieve deep spending cuts in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion.
But Senate Democrats have railed against the package for the millions it could boot off of Medicaid and the trillions it could add to the federal deficit.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released two sets of scores Saturday and Sunday that reflected both current policy and current law. Under current policy, the bill would tack on just over $507 billion over the next decade. But under current law, the package would add roughly $3.3 trillion.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., countered that when it came to spending, Senate Democrats were being hypocritical.
‘I’ve been here a long time,’ Thune said. ‘And I’ve not been involved in a single spending debate and fight in which Republicans were trying to spend less, and Democrats were trying to spend more, with one exception.
‘And that’s national security,’ he continued. ‘Democrats are always willing to cut defense but never want to cut anywhere else.’
But Schumer accused Trump of ‘lying’ about the bill, particularly over the nature of proposed cuts to Medicaid and the economic growth potential tied to the tax package.
And in one final act of defiance ahead of the bill’s final passage, Schumer had the official title of the legislation ‘The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act’ nixed.
‘The American people will not forget what Republicans do in this chamber today,’ Schumer said.
