
In a vote that took hours to close, the Republican Senate majority voted 51-49 to open debate on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The legislation would extend a host of tax cuts from Trump’s first term, implement campaign promises such as no taxes on tips and overtime wages, and authorize hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending on immigration enforcement and national defense.
To offset the cost, it would cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and disabled people; and SNAP, the anti-poverty Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps.
The House will need to pass the bill again if it clears the Senate — and some House Republicans expressed concern about the latest version of the bill. Rep. David G. Valadao (R-California), whose district depends heavily on Medicaid, said he would not support a bill “that eliminates vital funding streams our hospital rely on.” He urged Senate Republicans to reverse changes they made to the Medicaid provisions in the House bill — “otherwise, I will vote no,” Valadao said in a statement.
“Mike is nervous as a pregnant nun right now,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) said Friday, referring to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). “He doesn’t know if he can get what we’re doing past his House.”
Democrats have highlighted the bill’s unpopularity in polls, including concerns about the Medicaid provisions and the bill’s effect on the national debt, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted this month. Overall, 42 percent of Americans oppose the budget bill “changing tax, spending and Medicaid policies,” compared with 23 percent who support the bill and 34 percent who say they have no opinion.
Trump has kept intense pressure on Congress to pass the legislation. The White House urged Congress in a statement Saturday to send it to Trump’s desk by July 4 and warned that “failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal.”
Republicans know very little about the measure’s fiscal impacts. Congressional bookkeepers have not released estimates on the bill’s wider economic effects, how much it would add to the national debt, if it would hasten Social Security insolvency, or how many people it would force off health insurance.
The Congressional Budget Office said Saturday that the Senate version would result in $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid, more than the roughly $800 billion that the House version proposes.
Trump and the GOP have pledged repeatedly not to touch Medicare benefits, but the House version of the legislation is so costly that it would force mandatory benefits cuts. The Senate’s bill is probably more expensive.
Republicans are using the budget reconciliation process to bypass a potential Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Democrats forced a full reading of the 980-page bill, which started late Saturday night. That is expected to be followed by a potential all-night blitz of amendment votes on Sunday, including Democratic proposals designed to damage politically vulnerable Republican senators.
Only then can the Senate vote on the package and send it back to the House, where significant disagreements remain. The lower chamber narrowly passed its version of the bill in May.
This bill is going to be an epic disaster. And Republicans will pass it because they can not and will not stand up to Trump.
The Senate Republicans seem to have taken some pains to see that the worst of the disasters don’t happen until 2029. The tax cuts are immediate, and the debt ceiling increase is immediate so the cuts don’t crash things, and the worst of the Medicaid cuts don’t happen until then. The House version of the bill is, as I recall it, much more about doing the cuts now rather than pushing them off through deficit spending. We’ll see if Mike Johnson has the votes to push the Senate’s changes through.