Senate Majority Leader John Thune is plowing ahead with plans to vote on the massive GOP reconciliation bill at the end of this week despite serious policy divides between the House and Senate, rifts within his own conference and unresolved Byrd Bath issues.
This is what it looks like when the Senate is about to jam the House — and many GOP senators are cheering it on.
News: During Monday night’s Senate GOP Conference meeting, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) stood up for his fellow Louisiana Republican, Speaker Mike Johnson, and insisted that the House won’t be able to pass what Senate Republicans have been cobbling together, citing the Senate’s stricter crackdown on Medicaid provider taxes.
Thune responded by saying the House will ultimately accept what the Senate passes, according to three senators in the room.
Several GOP senators told us they came away from the meeting — and this interaction in particular — with the impression that Thune is angling to use his substantial leverage to dare the House to reject any Senate-passed bill, especially with President Donald Trump eager to sign the measure by July 4.
Working in Thune’s favor here is the fact that no GOP lawmaker wants a formal conference or a “ping-pong” between the two chambers. And Republican senators are getting frustrated with the House’s SALT Caucus’ refusal to accept a compromise proposal. More on that in a moment.
Thune can also lean heavily on President Donald Trump to get a Senate-passed bill through the House and to his desk quickly — in theory.
House GOP leaders have made clear privately that they don’t believe the Senate’s provider tax language can pass in their chamber. They also don’t think a proposed “stabilization fund” for rural hospitals would alleviate enough of their members’ concerns. Some Republican senators, like Cassidy, want the House GOP’s preferences taken into consideration.
“This won’t work to not ever talk to the House and hope that they just take the bill,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.
Inside the room. The Senate’s provider tax freeze came under withering assault from several senators during last night’s meeting, according to multiple attendees.
As we scooped last night, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) handed out a flyer listing 10 states that would stand to lose the most amount of federal Medicaid funding over the next decade. North Carolina would forfeit the most by far — $38.9 billion, according to Tillis. That includes nearly $10 billion in lost hospital receipts.
At the bottom, the flyer stated: “Medicaid coverage for over 600,000 North Carolinians would be at risk.”
The political landscape is important here. Tillis is up for reelection in 2026 in a state that has elected Democrats to statewide offices in recent years. Democrats are expected to spend gobs of cash to try to defeat him next November.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who has stayed relatively quiet in public, also spoke up during the meeting, saying the provider tax language is bad for his state.
During the meeting, Senate GOP leaders confirmed plans to add a rural hospital stabilization fund to the bill, but they didn’t provide specifics.
SALT. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) is leading talks with the handful of New York, California and New Jersey SALT holdouts. Mullin is bullish on a potential deal to keep the House’s $40,000 cap on deducting state-and-local taxes but put harsher limits on how many high-income households can claim the full deduction.
The SALT crew says they’re not taking this deal. Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) told reporters that GOP senators would have to “offer something in return” for lowering the income limit. Republicans could do that by increasing the $40,000 deduction cap or raising it more to account for inflation over time.
But Senate Republicans don’t want to do that. Plenty of them are itching to jam blue-state House members on SALT. There’s heavy skepticism that the SALT crew would torpedo Trump’s agenda over lowering the income limit from $500,000 to, say, $300,000.
“We’re to the point where people have to make a decision if it’s worth voting against. And that’s on both sides,” Mullin said Monday.
Speaking of taxes. Senate Republicans’ tax package costs $4.2 trillion over a decade using traditional accounting methods, per a preliminary JCT analysis. That shows the full price tag of extending the 2017 tax cuts, which aren’t counted under the GOP’s current policy baseline.
Byrd news. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) proposal to allow the sale of millions of acres of federal land fails to comply with the Byrd Rule. We scooped this last night.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats fought hard to scrap the provision during Byrd arguments. The Montana and Idaho GOP senators opposed Lee’s effort too.
The Oversight race. The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee backed Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) to be the ranking member of the Oversight Committee on Monday night. That makes him the heavy favorite heading into today’s caucus-wide vote.
“We’re gonna run through the tape,” Garcia told reporters after the Steering vote.
Garcia notched an impressive 33 votes. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) got 15 votes. Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) got 8 votes and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) got 6 votes.
