Congress
Megabill threatens to languish as challenges pile up
Republicans aren’t panicking about their fraying domestic policy bill. But they aren’t exactly sure about how it’s all going to come together, either.
Senate Republicans emerged from a closed-door lunch meeting Thursday putting on a brave face about the megabill’s progress. Yet this time last week, members were expecting revised text of the sprawling bill Monday with votes starting a couple of days later. In other words, they thought they’d be close to done by now.
Instead, Majority Leader John Thune refrained from giving his members a specific timeline during a closed-door lunch Thursday, according to three attendees granted anonymity to describe the private meeting. Senators are preparing to stay in town and vote through the weekend, but internal policy disputes and procedural roadblocks thrown up by the chamber’s parliamentarian are keeping firmer plans in flux.
A July 4 deadline being pushed by the White House hangs over Capitol Hill as the only real forcing mechanism, and some Republicans said they were glad to have it even if many others harbor doubts about whether that target can be met.
“I don’t think it gets easier to pass going longer,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. “The more time we take, the more people find things they want to change.”
The latest blow for the GOP came after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough warned that key Medicaid language would not comply with the strict rules that govern what can be included in a bill Republicans intend to pass along party lines using special budget rules. GOP senators expressed confidence they would be able to address MacDonough’s concerns, which some described as “technical,” and salvage the proposal.
But that, Thune acknowledged, will take time and threaten his plan of holding an initial vote Friday: “The parliamentarian’s decisions may push that back.”
Noticeably absent from the debate early Thursday was President Donald Trump, who has the bulk of his legislative agenda tied up in the bill. He returned late Wednesday from a trip to Europe and is scheduled to hold a White House event on the megabill Thursday afternoon.
His lobbying is widely seen as a necessary ingredient in getting the bill done. And for all the anxiety about the parliamentarian decisions Thursday, the more profound issue for Republicans are their internal divides about the policy provisions in the bill — particularly those dealing with Medicaid.
MacDonough’s rejection of initial language curtailing state provider taxes, which most states use to leverage federal health care dollars, emboldened the so-called “Medicaid moderates,” who believe the proposal is not ready for prime time. Nor have they been convinced by leadership’s offer of a $15 billion rural hospital fund, though negotiations are expected to force that number higher.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who spoke with Trump Wednesday about the Medicaid language, said the ruling gave Republicans “a chance to get it right” and expected Trump would be more involved now that he’s “back on terra firma.”
“I think he wants this done. But he wants it done well. He doesn’t want this to be a Medicaid cut bill — he made that very clear to me,” Hawley said. “He said this is a tax cut bill, it’s not a Medicaid cut bill. I think he’s tired of hearing about all these Medicaid cuts.”
Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) walked Republicans through MacDonough’s rulings during the closed-door lunch. Most left saying it would be relatively straightforward to tweak the proposal and keep it in the bill. Senate GOP leaders are counting on the questioned provisions to generate some $250 billion in savings to offset tax cuts and other costly items.
“I’m feeling much better after lunch,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said walking out. “The parliamentarian did kind of a little bit of a hand grenade, but I’ve been encouraged by what we heard.”
The tight-lipped Crapo would not discuss details of MacDonough’s rulings Thursday. But Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota said that, based on Crapo’s briefing, the issue had to do with a provision that would freeze provider taxes in states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act.
“It was a technical issue with a technical solution,” he said.
Other pitfalls remain to be seen. Republicans are still waiting for MacDonough to issue rulings on their tax plan, while other committees are waiting on final decisions on a crucial food-aid plan and other provisions they had to rework after she rejected their initial efforts.
And while senators have been focused on resolving their own disputes, they also have to be mindful of the narrowly divided House — where pockets of Republicans have continued to raise angry objections to changes their Senate counterparts have been making to the bill that passed the House last month.
No group has been more vocal than the blue-state Republicans pushing for an expansion of the state-and-local-tax deduction. They received an offer brokered by the administration Thursday that would keep the House-passed $40,000 deduction cap but lower the income threshold and change how the deduction is indexed to inflation, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the talks.
Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) was one of several key players who poured cold water on the offer, saying that he “declined the offer to participate … in further faux-negotiations until the Senate gets real.” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a key go-between, insisted “we’re going to find a landing spot.”
For House conservatives, meanwhile, the outrage of the day was MacDonough’s new decisions axing the health care provisions — including some aimed at excluding undocumented immigrants from federal benefits. Several publicly called on senators to overrule the parliamentarian, or fire her outright — a power Thune holds.
Most Republican senators rejected that demand Thursday, warning that it would derail the reconciliation process.
“People should remember that what comes around goes around when it comes to the parliamentarian,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key undecided vote. “She may rule the way you like one day, the way you don’t the next.”
Thune also rejected calls to sidestep MacDonough, though the headache could become substantially worse if Trump weighs in. So far the White House is staying out of the Senate’s procedural machinations and even Trump’s allies are signaling that he should keep quiet when it comes to MacDonough.
“I hope he doesn’t,” Cramer said.
Benjamin Guggenheim and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
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.
Four years ago, California Rep. Ro Khanna’s staff voted to unionize — one of a handful of Democratic offices that sought to ride a wave of organizing momentum during then-President Joe Biden’s administration.
Much has changed since, to put it mildly, but Khanna aides persevered and recently won approval of their first collectively bargained contract — the first labor agreement of its kind inside Congress.
“This was four years in the making,” Nicole Waring, a deputy director of constituent services for Khanna and the union steward, said in an interview. “We finally, finally reached the point where we were able to finalize our contract and ratify it.”
The agonizing process of turning pro-union enthusiasm into an actual binding agreement is both a breakthrough for the fitful labor movement on Capitol Hill while also underscoring how that movement has sputtered in the years since Biden left office, Donald Trump took back the White House and unionization moved off the front burner for Democratic staffers.
Since an initial wave of offices voted to unionize in 2022, that momentum has largely petered out. Less than a dozen offices are now unionized as staffers’ efforts are complicated by heavy workloads, adversarial bosses and Congress’ recent record high turnover rates that have led some aides to the conclusion that unionizing is more trouble than it’s worth.
Against that backdrop, that the eight-person union in Khanna’s office was able to win a contract constitutes a bright spot for organizers.
The agreement establishes a higher salary floor and a mechanism to renegotiate salaries if the office’s budget allowance increases, according to Waring and portions of the text reviewed by Blue Light News.
The document also codifies a procedure to resolve internal grievances. When Khanna almost certainly wins reelection, the agreement — which was officially ratified in August — will continue through next term.
“I’m proud of our office for signing the first long-term contract in the history of the U.S. Congress. I hope this can serve as a model for other offices in Congress,” Khanna said in a statement thanking his staff. “We need to be a model for the collective bargaining in our offices that we want to see across our nation.”
Waring said Khanna and his senior aides were supportive and trusting during contract negotiation but noted that, even under those positive circumstances, the effort was time- and labor-intensive.
“There’s a lot of back and forth. It takes time to review each passback of the contract, redline everything,” Waring said. “The biggest thing was we wanted to make sure that this contract would be governable, and rather than just make things convenient and take shortcuts, make sure that it was going to be something that we knew would stand the test of time.”
Khanna’s chief of staff, Marie Baldassarre, said in an interview the process for her office took years because “we realized like this is going to actually impact people’s lives, and it’s a binding contract, and so we have to get it right.”
“It’s just never been done before, and none of us were experts,” she added.
Staffers on Capitol Hill often face a grueling office cultures that can hamstring efforts to advance worker protections. Staffers for pro-labor Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), for example, voted to unionize in 2023 but then faced internal retaliation, according to the Nevada Independent.
Staffers for lawmakers across the ideological spectrum can be subjected to long hours, eyebrow-raising member requests and unrelenting demands that can spur staffer interest in pursuing labor protections — but also fears about potentially hindering their careers.
A person involved in the Congressional Workers Union — an umbrella group that provides support to individual office bargaining units — called the Khanna office contract “historic” and acknowledged it was “probably the biggest win recently” for the broader organizing effort.
“There’s small wins all the time,” added the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the group.
Staffers for former Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) ratified a contract in the final days of his term in December 2022. While that contract was technically the first for a member office, it was largely symbolic given Levin’s imminent departure. Staff for Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) secured “memorandums of understanding” with their members in 2024, but not formal contracts.
“Hats off to them for getting it done,” Levin said in an interview. “In terms of what comes next, much will depend on the outcome of the midterms.”
Levin, a labor attorney, said that Republican majorities and White House have had a chilling effect on Capitol Hill unions and predicted that if Democrats take back the House majority next year, a flurry of labor activity will ensue. He added that several Democrats with close ties to organized labor are poised to enter the House, naming fellow Michigan Democrat and former SEIU organizer Donavan McKinney.
“In this political climate, the idea of getting contracts negotiated on Blue Light News, where it’s hardly ever been done, I think that seems very challenging to me,” Levin said. “I do think it’s great that another office has gotten the first contract, and I think the momentum will continue to grow from here.”
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