Congress
Doubts abound for Thune’s aggressive megabill timeline
In Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s perfect world, he’d be ready by this time next week to start voting on the GOP’s sweeping megabill.
But this world is far from perfect, Thune and fellow Senate Republicans learned Tuesday. A host of concerns from diverse pockets of the GOP are threatening his grand plan of winning Senate passage by July 4 — with some in his ranks warning of an epic face-plant if Republican leaders push too hard, too fast.
“My guess is it will fail,” predicted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) when asked about potentially calling votes next week. “I don’t want to see it fail. I want this thing to succeed.”
Monday’s highly anticipated release of legislative text on tax, health care and other key policy provisions only served to underscore the challenges yet to be overcome. Fiscal hawks like Johnson are sounding the alarm that the bill doesn’t do nearly enough to lower the deficit. More moderate senators are voicing deep unease about new Medicaid provisions. Still others don’t like the proposed changes to clean-energy incentives or President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts.
These considerable policy gaps are up against a thin Republican majority — Thune has only three votes to spare, and one all-but-guaranteed “no” vote in Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — and a seemingly impossible timeline. Leaders are hoping to take a first vote on the megabill by next Wednesday or Thursday, according to GOP senators and aides, setting up final passage over the weekend.
But committees are still trying to get fiscal estimates for their proposals as well as final rulings from the Senate parliamentarian, which could jettison some of their pet provisions from the bill at the 11th hour.
While Vice President JD Vance backed the July 4 target for Senate passage during a closed-door lunch with Republican senators Tuesday, he pointed to the August recess as the ultimate deadline for getting a bill to Trump’s desk, according to two attendees.
The pessimism about quick Senate action has drifted downtown, where lobbyists are still poring over the 549-page text released Monday by the Senate Finance Committee. K Street power players are closely monitoring the negative reactions inside the Senate GOP.
“The general sense downtown that is causing concern is that the bill in its current form cannot pass either body,” said one lobbyist at a prominent Washington firm who was granted anonymity to share their views candidly. “So the bill is still, by necessity, open and will be changed.”
Another lobbyist, speaking under similar conditions, said that as Senate Republicans “have to shift policy to get votes, there are big dollars in play” that could force lawmakers to explore deep cuts in other policy areas — cuts that could expose entirely new fissures.
And that’s setting aside another inconvenient fact for Republicans: Whatever changes the Senate makes, the House will have to weigh in again after only narrowly passing its carefully crafted version of the bill last month. Some senators are already suggesting the House will just have to deal with whatever ends up getting sent back over.
“We first get 51 senators together and then we’ll see what the House can do,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Tuesday, referring to the contentious Finance text as “an initial draft.”
Getting 51 senators, however, is looking like a tall order.
GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Susan Collins of Maine reiterated their concerns Tuesday with the Finance proposal to cap medical provider taxes that fund state obligations to Medicaid, arguing that it could hurt rural hospitals.
Though her state doesn’t use provider taxes, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has her own concerns about different Medicaid language pertaining to new work requirements. Asked if she is prepared to vote down the bill over the Medicaid issues, she said, “I don’t think it’s going to stay in this form.”
Hawley separately critiqued the tax provisions rolled out by Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), calling the package a “departure from what President Trump called for” in a Tuesday morning interview with MAGA strategist Steve Bannon: “They want to roll back some of these Trump tax cuts, the populist tax cuts: no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime.”
He told reporters in the Capitol that he had spoken with Trump about the Senate proposal, describing the president as “surprised” by the bill’s Medicaid language. And Collins, who met with Vance separately this week, said she is still suggesting changes to the bill.
Thune, after the Senate’s closed-door lunch, acknowledged he is still negotiating with members of his conference, including Hawley and Collins, about “components or pieces of the bill that they would like to see modified or changed.”
Items that are likely to be the subject of the heaviest lobbying include a tax cut for pass-through businesses that was reduced from the House plan as well as a planned increase in university endowment taxes — even though Senate Republicans significantly softened what House Republicans had proposed.
The job of threading the needle has largely fallen to Crapo, the stealthy dealmaker who crafted the Medicaid and tax portion of the legislation and briefed GOP conference members Monday on the policies.
“He did what he does best: balanced everybody’s concerns and found the sweetest spot he could find, and it’s not adequate for some people,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) of how Crapo’s been fielding concerns from his colleagues.
One major issue is that Crapo’s draft made some business tax cuts permanent rather than sunsetting them at the end of 2029, as the House did — a key priority for himself and his fellow Finance Committee Republicans, but at the expense of some other provisions, including the provider tax.
“Every spending reduction that we were able to achieve was helpful in achieving the permanence,” Crapo told reporters Tuesday, estimating the Medicaid changes alone generated hundreds of billions of dollars in offsets.
But GOP senators who expected Crapo’s Medicaid language to largely match the House’s were caught off guard by those changes, and now he and Thune are dealing with potentially time-consuming pushback.
“I never thought we could get it done by the Fourth of July,” said Murkowski. “But you know what? I’m not in charge of the schedule.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton raised $18 million in the third quarter of 2026 across his campaign and his joint fundraising committees, his campaign tells Blue Light News, a significant haul for the homestretch of the election.
Paxton’s number is double his $9 million second-quarter total, and signals Republican donors are rallying behind their Texas nominee. The campaign did not provide a current cash-on-hand total.
Democrat James Talarico’s campaign has yet to release his fundraising totals for the quarter. He raised $30 million last quarter.
“We now have the resources to make sure every Texan sees Talarico’s radical record between now and Election Day,” said Nick Maddux, senior adviser to the Paxton campaign.
The past quarter — the first full reporting period after Paxton’s primary runoff victory in May — saw Republicans flock to Texas for their midterm convention, which featured pro-Paxton fundraisers on the sidelines. Last week, the Paxton campaign announced a massive $20 million ad buy across the state, one of the largest-ever single media investments in a Texas Senate race.
Paxton needs the money: In a recording of a private donor event last month shared with POLITICO, he said he has “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign,” pointing to influence “from D.C.”
Texas has emerged as a huge money suck for Senate Republicans, who have poured tens of millions into the state to aid Paxton. Senate Leadership Fund, their top super PAC, has spent or reserved well over $100 million in the state to date, and the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. and its affiliates plan to spend near $45 million in the state through Oct. 12.
Paxton has acknowledged that money has changed the race’s narrative: In a recording of a private donor event last monthshared with POLITICO, he said he has “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign,” pointing to influence “from D.C.”
Most recent public polling shows Talarico with a small lead in the race in spite of the recent onslaught in GOP spending, though Paxton’s campaign released an internal poll last week showing Paxton leading by three points.
Sen. Raphael Warnock is hitting the road for the last month before Election Day.
The Georgia Democrat’s final midterm campaign surrogate sprint will only increase chatter around the possibility that he might run for president in 2028, according to a nine-stop itinerary shared first with Blue Light News.
First, he’ll touch down in New Hampshire on Tuesday before hitting Nevada on Wednesday. Next, he’ll travel to South Carolina (Oct. 13), Mississippi (Oct. 14), North Carolina (Oct. 15), South Carolina (Oct. 16-17), Michigan (Oct. 20-21), Wisconsin (Oct. 23) and Ohio (Oct. 24-26).
“Senator Reverend Warnock will be hitting the trail to energize voters who are sick of the President enriching himself while ordinary people continue to pay more for everything,” a spokesperson told Playbook. “Tapping into the righteous anger that voters are feeling across the country, the pastor in the Senate will again make the campaign trail his pulpit: calling out Trump’s corruption, while leaving voters hopeful for the next generation of Democratic leadership.”
Asked recently at the Texas Tribune Festival about whether he would run for president, Warnock said: “We’ll see what happens.”
Democrats are eager to win back subpoena power if they retake Congress, but they’re split on how hard they’ll go after corporate America.
The party is united by the idea of aggressive oversight of President Donald Trump’s administration, which will help shape their messaging in the run-up to the 2028 election. But Democrats are at odds over how fiercely to use their probing power to go after the corporations, law firms and universities that courted the White House over the past two years.
“We don’t want to turn into a banana republic where you lose an election and it’s all about retribution,” Rep. Bill Foster, a senior member of the Financial Services Committee, said.
“We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption,” he added.
Some progressives counter that a restrained approach would sit uneasily with the party’s base.
“It would be political suicide for Democrats to campaign on fighting corruption and then turn around and go easy on the very companies that are facilitating it,” said Ella Fanger, corporate power policy adviser at the liberal nonprofit group Demand Progress.
Prime targets for some Democrats are the tech companies that have taken steps to be on the president’s good side, like Apple, Amazon and Meta, which have all donated to Trump’s ballroom effort. Major cryptocurrency players, including Coinbase, Ripple and Tether also chipped in for the ballroom, and will be subject to questioning from Democrats.
The late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s networks and associates are also poised for probes — a push that has ensnared big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America in the past.
Sen. Chris Murphy said the party should focus on the nexus between Trump and corporate corruption.
“We should get to the bottom of the corrupt relationship that exists between corporations in this country and the Trump administration,” Murphy said, pointing to questions he’s posed about a tobacco company’s donation to Trump’s super PAC before new e-cigarette rules were unveiled.
Still, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who serves on Senate Banking, warned against the weaponization of power.
“Our focus should be solving problems that we’re seeing happening,” she said, pointing to cost-of-living issues around health care, housing and energy.
What else we’re watching:
— FIRST IN IC: BUILD AMERICA CAUCUS AGENDA — Energized by progress on permitting and housing legislation this term, a bipartisan development-focused caucus is rolling out a detailed agenda for next term. The 40-member Build America Caucus is releasing a 95-page package of proposals, first shared with Blue Light News, that outlines plans touching on health care, transportation, child care and research. The group launched last year with the goal of cutting red tape and regulatory bottlenecks to spur development.
— AI COLLAB STILL ILLUSIVE FOR CRUZ, CANTWELL — Commerce Chair Ted Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell might still be celebrating Senate passage of their landmark college sports bill last week, but it’s unclear the momentum will carry forward to agreement on another committee priority: artificial intelligence. Among the dozen lawmakers, aides and industry experts who spoke to Blue Light News, few expect the two senators to shed their well-established ideologies and styles after the mutual win. That could doom their ability to replicate their latest achievement in something as complex and divisive as an AI regulatory framework.
Jasper Goodman, Katherine Hapgood, Riley Rogerson and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.
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