WASHINGTON, DC- JUNE 30: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) walks back to his office from the Senate floor on Monday June 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Lawmakers are working on a vote for the Big Beautiful Bill. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The Washington Post
Senate Republicans inched toward passing their massive tax and immigration bill Monday, working through the evening to win over the final holdouts as they seek to deliver the first major legislative victory of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would extend tax cuts passed in 2017, enact campaign promises such as no tax on tips, spend hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defense, and slash spending on social benefit programs.
The $3.3 trillion legislation survived a brief GOP revolt over the weekend to allow the chamber to move forward with debate on the measure — but its passage late Monday remained far from certain.
Trump has pressed Congress to pass the bill by July 4, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt implored Republicans on Monday to “stay tough and unified” as they rushed to meet the deadline. “The White House and the president are adamant that this bill is passed, and that this bill makes its way to his desk,” Leavitt told reporters.
But with a 53-47 majority, Senate Republicans can lose only three votes — and two Republicans have already indicated they will oppose it.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) took to the Senate floor twice Sunday night to excoriate his party’s legislation, saying it would break Trump’s promise not to cut Medicaid benefits and would put more than 600,000 people in his state at risk of losing their health insurance. Tillis announced Sunday — after Trump threatened him with a primary challenge for voting against starting debate on the bill — that he would not seek reelection next year.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also voted Saturday against taking up the bill, and he is expected to vote against passage because it would raise the debt limit by $5 trillion. And Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have expressed concerns over the bill’s Medicaid funding cuts and have not said how they will vote.
Vice President JD Vance nearly had to cast the tiebreaking vote Saturday night to start debate on the bill before Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) switched his vote, and Republicans will need him to trek to the Capitol if three Republicans vote “no.”
If the bill makes it through the Senate, the House will need to pass it again before sending it to Trump’s desk — and many House Republicans are unhappy with the Senate’s changes to the measure.
About a dozen members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus — almost all of whom voted for the bill last month — are upset that the Senate version would add more to the federal deficit. Other House Republicans have balked at the Senate bill’s Medicaid funding cuts, which are deeper than the House version. They fear the cuts will hurt Medicaid recipients and lead rural hospitals in their districts to close, according to House Republicans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private discussions with Republican leadership and their colleagues.
Moderate Republicans in the House have privately expressed concern that Trump lashed out at Tillis for voting against starting debate on the bill. Some of them are worried Trump will punish lawmakers with concerns about the bill rather than hearing them out — even if voting for the bill means some of them lose their seats, costing Republicans their thin House majority.
Republicans who vote for the bill could also face political risk. Elon Musk, the billionaire and former White House adviser who broke with Trump after criticizing the bill, pledged Monday to try to defeat Republicans who vote for the bill who campaigned on cutting government spending.
Those Republicans “will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” Musk wrote on X. He also said he would support Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whom Trump has threatened with a primary for voting against the bill.
Democrats have been determined to make the bill’s passage through the Senate as painful as possible. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) demanded that the entire 940-page legislation be read aloud on the Senate floor, which took nearly 16 hours. Only after the reading did debate begin in earnest on the Senate floor Sunday afternoon.
Democrats offered an onslaught of motions Monday to revise the bill before the final vote, all of which failed, although many of them drew support from one or two Republicans. The idea is to force Republicans to take uncomfortable votes that Democrats can use to hammer them when they run for reelection. Murkowski had voted with Democrats on five of them by early evening, underscoring her concerns with aspects of the legislation.
Schumer accused Republicans of negotiating backroom deals as they work to secure the votes. “We can’t get things done the way we’re supposed to unless they show us how they’re changing the bill,” Schumer told reporters Monday.
Republicans scoffed at the accusation. “A lot of this is just the Democrats going through their stages of grief with stupid amendments that we’ll vote down,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said. “For them, there’s nothing left but the crying, I’m afraid.”
Voting on amendments was slow. At 5 p.m.Eastern time — after eight hours of nonstop voting — Schmitt said the Senate was only in the “bottom of the third inning” of the slog known as a “vote-a-rama.”
Republican aides privately suggested that the approach signaled that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) was still negotiating behind the scenes with potential Republican holdouts.
Republicans are using a process known as reconciliation to dodge a Democratic filibuster and pass the bill with a simple majority. But the process forces Republicans to make sure every line of the bill complies with the “Byrd rule,” which governs what can and can’t be included in reconciliation bills.
Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian charged with determining whether provisions violate the Byrd rule, was still reviewing legislative language Monday evening, according to Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.). That’s part of the reason that voting was going so slowly, he said.
“The amendments are coming in faster than she can get to them, so we’re actually having to just vote on them as they come out,” Mullin told reporters.
Senators are set to vote on Republican amendments as well as Democratic ones, including one from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) that would reduce the rate at which the federal government reimburses states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act for new enrollees. Scott and three other Republican holdouts on Saturday demanded a vote on the amendment in exchange for their votes to start debate on the bill.
The bill would extend expiring tax cuts passed during Trump’s first term and make permanent several corporate tax breaks the White House hopes will spur economic growth. It includes a trio of Trump’s populist campaign promises: no taxes on tips, overtime wages or auto loan interest. It would also add $6,000 to the standard deduction for seniors in a nod to another Trump campaign pledge: ending taxes on Social Security benefits.
The bill would cut $1.1 trillion from health benefits programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And, by 2034, nearly 12 million people would lose health insurance.
Thune defended the bill’s Medicaid provisions Monday as necessary to rein in federal spending on the program.
“In the time I’ve been here, we have never, ever done anything to reform and improve and strengthen these programs that are growing at an unsustainable rate, that will wreck our economy and wreck our country if we don’t start making some changes,” Thune said on the Senate floor.
“So, yes, there are some improvements and reforms to Medicaid to make it more efficient, to make sure that the people who are supposed to benefit from Medicaid do, and that it doesn’t go to people who shouldn’t benefit from Medicaid.”
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Paul Kane contributed to this report.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
