Trump megabill faces GOP holdouts amid marathon vote-a-rama
by Alexander Bolton -
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) needs to nail down the support of multiple Republican senators, including at least two moderates and three conservatives, who haven’t yet said they will vote for final passage of President Trump’s megabill after a marathon series of amendment votes.
Senate Republicans are feeling mostly confident about passing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” but the legislation still faces several obstacles.
Three conservatives — Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — are pressing for the adoption of an amendment that would cut an additional $313 in federal Medicaid spending.
And at least two of them, Johnson and Scott, won’t say if they’ll vote for final passage if the amendment doesn’t succeed.
The amendment, which would stop the 9-to-1 federal match for Medicaid enrollees who are “able-bodied” and without dependent children in states that expanded the program, is unlikely to be adopted.
Multiple Republican senators, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have pushed hard against the Medicaid cuts already in the bill.
“I think that this effort to cut Medicaid funding is a mistake,” Hawley told reporters over the weekend.
“Frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching. If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver to working-class people. You cannot take away health care from working people,” he said.
Live updates: Democrats lose key appeal on Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ as vote-a-rama kicks off
At least two moderates, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), haven’t yet said whether they will vote to pass the bill as they press for major changes.
Collins has offered an amendment to create a new 39.6 percent tax bracket for individuals who earn more than $25 million annually and couples who earn more than $50 million.
Her amendment would allocate the money raised to double the size of a rural hospital relief fund from $25 billion to $50 billion.
Murkowski, meanwhile, is planning to offer an amendment to slow down the phaseout of wind and solar tax credits.
The timing of the votes on the amendments to further cut Medicaid, double the rural hospital fund and slow down the phaseout of wind and solar tax credits had yet to be announced as of mid-Monday afternoon.
Thune wouldn’t say Monday morning whether Republicans have the votes to pass the bill, and he predicted the marathon vote-a-rama on amendments would drag on late into the day.
Thune can only afford three Republican defections and still pass the bill.
Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) are hard “no” votes.
Paul has balked at language in the bill raising the debt limit by $5 trillion, while Tillis has balked at Medicaid spending cuts that he warns could cause more than 600,000 North Carolinians to lose Medicaid coverage.
The vote-a-rama started with a fierce partisan battle over the Republicans’ use of a “current policy” budget baseline to score the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts as not adding to federal deficits beyond 2034.
The parliamentarian delivered crucial guidance to Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stating that he has authority under Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act to set the baseline for the bill.
Senate Democrats have argued for weeks that the bill should be scored on a “current-law” baseline, under which the extension of the 2017 tax cuts would add $3.5 trillion to federal deficits between 2025 and 2034 and would increase deficits after 2034.
If Democrats had gotten the parliamentarian to agree with them, they could have forced Republicans to rewrite the bill entirely. But they didn’t get that crucial ruling on the baseline.
“I feel great. I have never felt better,” Graham exulted on the Senate floor. “We’re not overruling the parliamentarian because she said it was up to the chairman to set the baseline.”
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) offered a motion to overturn the ruling of the chair that the bill was in compliance with the Budget Act, but it failed in a 53-to-47, party-line vote.
Things grew tense on the Senate floor when Schumer castigated his Republican colleagues for lying about the huge cuts to Medicaid that would happen if the bill becomes law.
“Our colleagues on the Republican side lack the courage of their convictions to do the right thing for the American people, it’s outrageous,” Schumer thundered.
He said that Tillis, who has warned loudly that the Medicaid cuts will be devastating to his state, is “one of the truth tellers on the other side” and charged that Republicans are “deploying fake math and budgetary hocus-pocus to make it seem like their billionaire giveaways don’t cost anything.”
Schumer’s rhetoric got so heated that he drew a rare scolding from the Senate’s presiding chair, who at the time was Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio).
Moreno had to warn Schumer not to violate Rule XIX, which states that a senator shall not impute to another senator any conduct or motive that is unworthy or unbecoming of a senator.
Another remarkable moment came when Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), during his stint as the Senate’s presiding chair, ruled that Graham, the Budget chair, would have sole authority to decide whether provisions of the bill comply with budget law.
Hagerty said that unless Graham asserts that a provision of the bill or an amendment causes a violation of the 1974 Budget Act, the presiding chair will not sustain any budgetary point-of-order objection against the bill.
That prompted a forceful objection from Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who said the ruling gave Graham “the ability of the chair to create a phony baseline.”
He said that “has never been used in reconciliation, not ever.”
“This breaks a 51-year tradition of the Senate for honest numbers,” he declared.
Merkley’s motion to overrule the chair failed on a party-line vote, 47-51.
Republicans stayed unified on a succession of other Democratic motions to derail the bill, including a motion by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to send the bill back to the Finance Committee to rework changes to health care provider taxes that will reduce federal Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in states around the country.
Republicans also rejected a motion from Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) to send the bill back to committee to rework cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
And senators rejected along party lines a motion from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member on the Finance panel, to send the bill back to Finance to redo other changes to Medicaid.
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