Senate Republicans took a critical first step toward passing their sweeping budget reconciliation bill Saturday night by voting to bring the package to the floor, setting the stage for a heated floor fight and a grueling series of amendment votes that was likely to stretch past the weekend.
The vote to proceed to the bill was held open for more than three hours as GOP leaders worked to convince holdouts to let the package move to the floor. Finally, senators voted to take up the measure on a 51-49 vote; Vice President JD Vance was on hand to break a tie, but that ended up being unnecessary.
As expected, GOP Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky — the latter played golf with President Donald Trump earlier Saturday — voted against the motion to proceed. Trump promptly threatened to back a primary challenger to Tillis, one of the most endangered incumbents next year.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin initially voted “no,” but later flipped after lengthy discussions in Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office. After the vote, Johnson said leadership agreed to back a controversial amendment that he said would cut Medicaid spending on working-age adults without children and without disabilities, which paved the way for the final holdouts to back the motion.
Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, and Mike Lee of Utah were the last to vote, other than Johnson who flipped. Eric Schmitt of Missouri — who also played golf with Trump on Saturday, along with Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — was another who took his time deciding.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, wasn’t part of the group negotiating in Thune’s office but evidently had concerns of her own. She huddled with Graham, Senate Finance Chairman Michael D. Crapo, R-Idaho, and party leaders on the floor.
She and Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, a fellow advocate for clean-energy tax credits that would be slashed under the bill, then went and spoke further with leadership in the cloakroom. Murkowski then voted to proceed to the bill after emerging with Curtis.
Later, Lummis went into Thune’s office to meet with the South Dakota Republican, Graham and Crapo. Johnson, Schmitt, Lee and Scott all went in as well, followed by Vance.
At that point only Lummis, Scott and Lee hadn’t voted yet. Finally, after nearly two hours sequestered in Thune’s office, the group came out and went to the floor to wrap up the vote.
“I think what we’re talking about is a path forward on amendments,” Thune said after the successful round of arm-twisting that led to the narrow procedural victory.
Johnson said leadership agreed to back an amendment from Scott that could save somewhere in the ballpark of $200 billion over a decade by setting a date for expiration of the 2010 health care law’s Medicaid expansion. That law funds 90 percent of costs for adults in states that opt into the program, which Johnson and other GOP critics argue shortchanges children and people with disabilities.
That higher matching rate would disappear under the emerging amendment, bringing rates down more in line with regular Medicaid state matches.
“In other words, single, able-bodied, working-age, childless adults will be treated just like a disabled child in Medicaid, as opposed to this enormous advantage which incentivizes providers to focus on those single adults,” Johnson said after the vote.
He said he had a commitment from President Donald Trump and leadership to support the amendment, but stopped short of guaranteeing success. And as currently drafted, the Congressional Budget Office said nearly 12 million individuals could lose health insurance under the Senate measure.
But Senate Republicans will need more cuts — or they’ll need to scale back the size of their nearly $4.5 trillion tax package.
Based on estimates from CBO late Saturday, the Senate substitute amendment as currently drafted could cost around $3.2 trillion over a decade after spending cuts are factored in, or $800 billion more than the House-passed version. That’s well above the maximum deficit increase House GOP conservatives have said they’ll agree to.
To even get to that stage, Senate Republicans still need to push their bill over the finish line in that chamber.
With Democrats bitterly opposed to the measure, they announced plans to insist that the entire 940-page substitute amendment be read aloud on the floor — a process that was estimated to take as long as 15 hours.
“Republicans won’t tell America what’s in the bill so Democrats are forcing it to be read start to finish on the floor,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote on the social platform X. “We will be here all night if that’s what it takes to read it.”
After the reading, the Senate would allow for as much as 20 hours of floor debate, although Republicans could give back some of the 10 hours allotted to them to help speed up the process.
And after all the debate time, senators could begin taking up an unlimited number of amendments in a marathon session known as a vote-a-rama that has often been an all-night affair. There will likely be budget points of order that will take up time as well, challenging certain items under the Byrd rule that restricts what can be included.
If that schedule holds, passage may not occur until sometime Monday.
Unruly majority
With Republicans still divided over the bill, which contains most of Trump’s legislative agenda, the outcome of the procedural vote was hardly a certainty.
Fiscal hawks had threatened to block it to win concessions of deeper spending cuts, while others expressed qualms about the size of Medicaid cuts that estimates show could cut millions of Americans off their health insurance.
Tillis, who faces a difficult reelection next year in a swing state, voted against taking up the bill Saturday after voicing concerns about potentially more than $30 billion in Medicaid cuts affecting his state.
“I did my homework on behalf of North Carolinians, and I cannot support this bill in its current form,” Tillis said in a statement. “It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”
But Republicans made some Medicaid tweaks to the bill text, released late Friday, that brought at least one opponent on board.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who spent weeks railing against Medicaid cuts, said Saturday he would vote for the motion to proceed to the bill and for passage of the bill. He said a delay in cuts to state taxes levied on health providers and the creation of a new $25 billion fund for rural hospitals would mean extra Medicaid dollars for Missouri in the short term.
“I’m going to spend the next however long trying to make sure that the cuts that we have successfully delayed never take place,” Hawley said in announcing his support for the bill that would make those cuts possible. “I think it is a huge mistake. I think that this has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid. And I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul searching.”
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is seeking a $100 billion hospital fund and suggested she would seek amendments to the bill, said she was nevertheless prepared to let the bill go to the floor. While she would respect the decision of the majority leader to bring the package up for debate, she said, “that does not mean in any way that I’m satisfied with the provisions in this bill.”
Expansive agenda
The filibuster-proof package, which Democrats have rallied against, would extend the expiring tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017, while offering new tax breaks including on tips and overtime pay.
It would provide about $320 billion in new money for the military and for immigration and border enforcement, while making deep cuts to the social safety net, including Medicaid and food stamps. The measure also would increase the nation’s $36.1 trillion debt limit by $5 trillion — enough to get past next year’s midterm elections.
Fiscal hawks have decried the bill for inadequate spending cuts that they say would do little to stem the tide of rising deficits already baked into budget projections.
And according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax package’s price tag grew by $250 billion overnight — much of that stemming from a deal with blue-state House Republicans to increase the state and local tax deduction cap. That’s despite more aggressive rollbacks of clean-energy tax credits that cut costs by over $40 billion compared with the initial Senate draft.
But according to the “current policy” baseline Republicans have directed scorekeepers to use to measure compliance with the budget resolution, the tax title would cost just $693 billion over a decade. And in total, the CBO said the bill would actually save more than $500 billion, after spending cuts are included.
That figure writes off the $3.76 trillion cost of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, which Democrats and budget hawks argue is a dangerous gimmick that hides the true deficit impact.
Land sale objections
An earlier obstacle was a provision by Lee to sell federal land in an effort to spur more affordable housing. But a resolution to that matter appeared to be baked in — a floor amendment to strike the language, led by Montana GOP Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy.
Sheehy earlier Saturday had threatened to vote against the motion to proceed, but in a statement later in the day he said he was on board after “productive discussions with leadership” on offering an amendment to strip Lee’s provision.
Lee watered down the language significantly in his latest draft, exempting all Forest Service land and significantly narrowing the scope of Bureau of Land Management acreage that would be subject to sale. But not only were there still potential Byrd rule and scoring issues with that language, Lee was facing significant opposition within his own caucus.
Later in the evening, Lee issued a statement that he’d agreed to withdraw the provision altogether, neutralizing the issue. He said the reasons were mainly procedural, with the Byrd rule preventing him from writing in “safeguards” to ensure that land could only be sold to U.S. households and not corporations or foreign interests.
Earlier in the day, senators openly admitted the bill was still a work in progress, including the centerpiece of the plan — the $4.5 trillion tax package.
Crapo made numerous changes, large and small, to the earlier draft which were included in the substitute amendment unveiled just before midnight Friday. But that wasn’t the final word, with more tweaks forthcoming.
“What you saw is final as of last night,” Crapo quipped to reporters earlier Saturday.
More tweaks were being readied for the “vote-a-rama” process that will ensue after all time for debate has expired, where the bill could be essentially rewritten on the fly before passage.
“I think it could be very interesting on the floor. I think this will not be your typical vote-a-rama, from what I hear,” Hawley said.
Shuttle move
Many of the substitute amendment’s tweaks to the expansive proposal were arcane changes designed to get around Byrd rule objections.
For example, Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, clarified a controversial artificial intelligence provision in his panel’s title of the bill.
Previously, an opt-in program that would enable states to access federal subsidies for AI deployment projects looked like it might have also restricted access to an earlier $42 billion broadband subsidy program. After Democrats cried foul, Cruz wrote in language clarifying that only the bill’s $500 million addition for AI subsidies would be affected.
Cruz also made his third, and possibly final, attempt to shoehorn in language to direct the transfer of the space shuttle Discovery display from a Virginia museum to a facility near Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
Instead of naming a “non-profit facility not more than 5 miles” from the NASA “field center” that would be selected to receive the Discovery, now the language simply says the shuttle would be placed on display at an “entity within the Metropolitan Statistical Area where such center is located.”
Sandhya Raman, Lia DeGroot, Aidan Quigley and Peter Cohn contributed to this report.
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