House Republicans passed their version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislative vehicle for President Donald Trump’s agenda, on a party-line vote early Thursday morning. The massive package is now Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s to handle. The Senate GOP faces a whole new set of hurdles to get the bill to Trump’s desk, and potential clashes in their caucus and with the House could still derail the bill’s passage.
Thanks to the budget reconciliation process, that set of hurdles does not include the filibuster. A simple majority vote is enough, and because Republicans control 53 Senate seats, Thune can lose three Republicans’ support and still pass the bill with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. Theoretically, Thune could call up the legislation immediately and pass it without a single Democratic vote. However, Senate Republicans say there’s work to be done before they can sign off on the bill.
Senate Republicans say there’s work to be done before they can sign off on the bill.
“We’ll make changes,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told NBC News last week. “We’ve been talking with the House and there’s a lot of things we agree on. … But there’ll be changes in a number of areas.”
And much like in the House, some of the lawmakers’ demands run at cross-purposes to demands from others in their caucus. For example, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has been adamant that the package not cut Medicaid benefits for his constituents. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and three other Republicans made clear to Thune that they don’t want to see clean energy tax credits ended, warning in a letter that doing so “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.”
The bill House Republicans passed Thursday does both of those things — and on a quicker timeline than previous versions of the legislation. House GOP leadership agreed to those changes to win over conservative holdouts who’d demanded deeper spending cuts over budgetary trickery that front-loaded tax cuts while spending cuts were put off for later. It’s conceivable that some Republicans would support amendments from their Democratic colleagues to blunt the impact of those most recent shifts.
But on the other end of the spectrum are the Republican senators such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin who think the House bill doesn’t cut enough. Paul, a fiscal gadfly who’s always been happy to stand in opposition to legislation he thinks increases the deficit by too much, told reporters, “The project afoot isn’t going to fix the deficit at all.” He said, “I’m not for continuing the Biden spending levels or the Biden deficits. Once the Republicans vote for this, the Republicans are going to own the deficit.”
Johnson told Politico, “Listen, in the House, President Trump can threaten to primary [holdouts], and those guys want to keep their seats,” he said. “I understand the pressure. Can’t pressure me that way.”
Johnson doesn’t make many good points, but this is one. The entire House is on the ballot next year, but only 22 Republican senators are up for re-election, with only two Republicans thought to potentially face serious contenders.
The number of differences that need to be resolved on both sides of the Capitol still makes it hard to see precisely how the math winds up mathing.
There’s also the matter of the provisions the House slipped in that don’t have to do with the budget, such as a ban on states regulating artificial intelligence. The Senate’s “Byrd rule” doesn’t allow those kinds of items in a budget reconciliation bill, requiring them to be stripped out before it can pass. Most of them are washed out in what’s called the “Byrd bath,” where the Senate parliamentarian hears arguments for and against tossing whatever is challenged as a violation. Thune said Thursday that the Senate’s “committees are working closely to identify potential Byrd problems ahead of time.”
Thune also told reporters that rather than trying to amend the House bill piecemeal, his conference will go ahead and write its own version. He and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., are hoping to get the final package to Trump’s desk by July 4. For that to happen, all the contradictions that have cropped up not only need to be smoothed out in the Senate but be able to pass through the House again.
It’s not an impossible task, as the last-minute push to get the bill through the House despite the odds against it showed. The urgency that comes from needing to raise the debt ceiling before the summer ends will also certainly light a fire under the normally plodding Senate. But the number of differences that need to be resolved on both sides of the Capitol still makes it hard to see precisely how the math winds up mathing in favor of getting Trump’s agenda finalized in the next seven weeks.