Congress
Capitol agenda: Thune’s 48-hour megabill scramble
Senate GOP leaders want to start voting on the “big, beautiful bill” in just two days. Right now, they’re scrambling to rewrite critical pieces of it while major policy disputes remain unresolved.
Catch up quick: Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) met separately with Donald Trump at the White House Monday as the president ramps up pressure on fiscal hawks to fall in line. Trump told Scott he wants a repeal of green credits under the Biden-era climate law and supports a balanced budget, the Florida senator said. The trio relayed Trump’s message to House Freedom Caucus members Monday night, but were publicly mum on other details.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) signaled progress in closing the chasm between chambers over the state-and-local-tax deduction, suggesting the Senate could keep the $40,000 cap negotiated in the House but change the income threshold. The rub: That combination was publicly rejected by the House’s SALT Republicans days ago.
Meanwhile, Senate GOP leaders are floating a fund to help offset the effects of Medicaid changes on rural hospitals — a major pain point among “Medicaid moderates” balking at Senate Finance’s push to slash the provider tax.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters he’s “absolutely happy with a rural fund” but cautioned, “I don’t know” if it will solve the issue. House GOP leaders are also warning it won’t pass their chamber.
GOP senators also have to keep in mind the 38 House Republicans who recently warned that Senate Majority Leader John Thune must adhere to a strict linkage between spending cuts and tax cuts in the bill. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) told Blue Light News Monday he thinks Senate Republicans are already straying from the House-passed plan.
“It looks like right now, with some of the scoring, it’s not working out,” Harris said. “If it should pass the Senate in its current rumored form, it probably would have trouble in the House.”
What to watch Tuesday: Committees will finish holding meetings with parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. Her last rulings on what can skirt the filibuster are expected as soon as Wednesday. Final text will follow once that process — known as the Byrd bath — wraps up.
Those Byrd droppings have multiple committees racing to redraft their portions of the megabill. Senate Agriculture Republicans believe they can salvage their cost-sharing plan for food aid. Senate Banking Republicans are reworking a proposal to cut funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
And Lee is now floating a narrower version of his plan to sell millions of acres of public lands after MacDonough deemed his initial proposal — which had drawn fierce opposition from a quartet of western-state GOP senators — noncompliant. Lee’s effectively halving his old proposal by removing Forest Service lands.
Thune still hopes to hold an initial vote on the megabill Thursday, but acknowledged the parliamentarian’s process is “taking a little bit longer” than anticipated. The raft of unresolved policy disputes have some senators openly doubting he can pull it off, with some predicting the first vote could slip to Friday.
“We’ll eventually pass something,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters Monday. “I just can’t tell you when.”
What else we’re watching:
— Dem Oversight election: Democrats will vote Tuesday morning to decide the top Democrat on the Oversight committee. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) is the frontrunner after the Californian clinched a majority of votes from the steering committee on the first ballot.
— War powers resolutions: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told Speaker Mike Johnson that he will no longer advance a resolution seeking to block U.S. involvement in the Iran-Israel conflict if the ceasefire that Trump announced holds. But in the Senate, Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said he’s forging ahead with forcing a vote on a similar resolution regardless of the ceasefire, and expects a vote sometime between Wednesday and Friday.
— Cassidy’s latest vaccine push: Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) criticized the top vaccine advisers of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Monday for lacking experience and urged the agency to delay a scheduled meeting with them. Cassidy said a meeting with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices scheduled for Wednesday should not proceed “with a relatively small panel, and no CDC Director in place to approve the panel’s recommendations.”
Garrett Downs, Nicholas Wu, Hailey Fuchs and Kelly Hooper contributed to this report.
Congress
Rep. Dusty Johnson to announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday
Rep. Dusty Johnson will announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday, according to two people granted anonymity to speak about private conversations.
Johnson has served as South Dakota’s sole House representative since 2019. He’s been a key player in major deals on Capitol Hill in recent years as the head of the Main Street Caucus of Republicans.
Johnson, long expected to mount a bid for higher office, will make the announcement in Sioux Falls.
Johnson is the eighth House Republican to announce a run for higher office in 2026. Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Byron Donalds of Florida, Randy Feenstra of Iowa, John James of Michigan and John Rose of Tennessee are also seeking governor’s offices; Reps. Andy Barr of Kentucky and Buddy Carter of Georgia have announced Senate runs.
Congress
Senate slated to take first vote on megabill Saturday
Senate Republicans are planning to take an initial vote at noon on Saturday to take up the megabill.
Leadership laid out the timeline during a closed-door lunch on Friday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said after the lunch. A person granted anonymity to discuss internal scheduling confirmed the noon timeline but cautioned Republicans haven’t locked in the schedule yet.
During the lunch, Speaker Mike Johnson pitched Senate Republicans on the tentative SALT deal, according to three people in the room. He said the deal was as good as Republican can get, according to the people.
Johnson noted he still has “one holdout” — an apparent reference to New York Republican Nick LaLota, who said in a brief interview Friday that if there was a deal, he was not part of it.
Leaving the meeting, Johnson was asked by reporters whether he thought Senate Republicans would accept the SALT deal. “I believe they will,” he replied. “They’re going to digest the final calculations, but I think we’re very, very close to closing that issue.”
In the meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Johnson laid out details of the fragile agreement, telling Senate Republicans the House SALT deal would be cut in half, to total roughly $192 billion. They restated it would raise the SALT cap to $40,000 for five years under the current House-negotiated SALT deal, and snap back to the current $10,000 cap after that.
In related matters, Kennedy and Hoeven also said the Senate will keep its provider tax proposal but delay its implementation, which Republicans believe will help it comply with budget rules. and Johnson also told Senate Republicans that he wants to do another reconciliation bill — which senators took to mean they would get another opportunity to secure spending cuts or provisions passed that have been squeezed out of the megabill.
Congress
Trump says July 4 is “not the end all”
President Donald Trump on Friday backed off the July 4 deadline he set for Congress to pass his megabill, acknowledging that the timing could slip as Republicans work through a series of political and logistical hurdles.
“It’s not the end all,” Trump said of the self-imposed Independence Day goal. “It can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time if possible.”
The remarks represented a clear softening of the White House’s position from just a day earlier, when Trump administration officials insisted that the GOP lawmakers pass the domestic policy package within a week despite a series of fresh obstacles.
Senate Republican leaders are still struggling to lock down the necessary 51 votes for the bill, amid objections from competing factions over the depth of the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.
The effort has also been hamstrung by a flurry of adverse rulings by the Senate parliamentarian that are now forcing lawmakers to rewrite significant portions of the bill.
The president indicated that he has little interest as of now in trying to directly overrule or even fire the parliamentarian — a step that some close allies in Congress had called for after she disqualified several of the bill’s provisions.
“The parliamentarian’s been a little difficult,” Trump said. “I disagree with the parliamentarian on some things, and on other ways she’s been fine.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed those issues on Thursday, saying Trump still expected Republicans to coalesce in the coming days and put the bill on his desk by July 4.
But asked directly on Friday, Trump took a more ambivalent stance.
“We have a lot of committed people and they feel strongly about a subject, subjects that you’re not even thinking about that are important to Republicans,” he said, appearing to reference the policy divisions within the Senate GOP conference.
Trump also singled out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for praise despite his resistance to the bill, complaining instead about the lack of Democratic votes.
“The problem we have is it’s a great bill, it’s a popular bill,” Trump said. “But we’ll get no Democrats.”
If all Republicans vote for the bill, it would not need Democrats’ support to pass.
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