Senate Republicans are vowing they will make changes to President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after it passed the House early Thursday morning.
While the end product is likely to contain sweeping areas of overlap with the proposal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson, GOP senators made clear Thursday that the House bill can’t pass without major changes. Some of the member demands are contradictory, with some fiscal hawks demanding beefed-up spending reductions while others want softening of the House’s Medicaid language and to preserve more green-energy incentives.
“I’m hoping now we’ll actually start looking at reality,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “I know everybody wants to go to Disney World, but we just can’t afford it.”
Johnson batted down the idea that he would fold under arm-twisting from Trump — much as his House counterparts did. “Listen, in the House, President Trump can threaten to primary [holdouts], and those guys want to keep their seats. I understand the pressure. Can’t pressure me that way.”
Johnson said there are sufficient votes to block the bill if his party doesn’t bend in his direction on spending reductions, including setting up a bicameral process for going “line by line” to find a total of roughly $6.5 trillion in cuts over the coming decade.
One of the Republicans he believes is in his corner — Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — said Thursday that while he supports the party’s tax agenda, he cannot support the bill if it includes a debt ceiling hike. Republicans want to use the party-line bill to increase the debt ceiling until after the 2026 election without having to give concessions to Democrats.
“I think if you’re going to raise the debt ceiling $4 or $5 trillion, it indicates that the project afoot isn’t going to fix the deficit at all,” Paul said. “Once Republicans vote for this, Republicans are going to own the deficit.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune can lose three GOP senators and still get the party-line bill — which ties a tax overhaul together with new border, defense and energy spending — through the chamber. Most Republicans view Paul as a hard “no” and acknowledge Johnson might be, as well.
Thune wants to get the bill through the Senate by July 4, saying Thursday that holiday deadline is the “goal and the aspiration” but will depend on “what does it take to get to 51?”
He added that he spoke to Trump after the House bill passed just hours before. “The president,” he said, is “very happy” and “ready to go to work with the Senate.”
In addition to the fiscal hawks, Thune is facing a clutch of senators who have concerns about the House’s language on a range of issues, including changes to Medicaid, the cancellation of green-energy tax credits and pushing some food-aid costs onto states.
Trump spoke to one of the potential holdouts — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — Wednesday night, though their conversation also touched on unrelated issues like disaster aid. Two others — Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said they expected significant changes.
“There are some things that we want to address on the Medicaid side that I think are challenging for us in Alaska,” Murkowski said.
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