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.

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.

All four Muslim Democratic House members are denouncing “racist smears” against Zohran Mamdani from lawmakers in both parties since his New York City mayoral primary win, according to a statement provided first to Blue Light News.

“The vile, anti-Muslim and racist smears from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle attacking Zohran Mamdani cannot be met with silence. These hateful, Islamophobic, and racist tropes have become so entrenched and normalized in our politics,” said Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Lateefah Simon of California in a statement.

The lawmakers said that “at a time when we are facing increased violence against elected officials, we cannot allow the attacks on Zohran Mamdani to continue” and asked for elected leaders to speak out on them.

Mamdani, who would become New York’s first Muslim mayor, has faced attacks from GOP lawmakers after his primary win this week. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tied him to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) called for him to be deported, among others. The left was also concerned about since-clarified comments from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) about Mamdani’s rhetoric about Israel.

Critics of the democratic socialist have called some of his comments about Israel, including his defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” antisemitic, which he’s denied.

The Muslim lawmakers have sought a more forceful pushback from their leaders to the GOP attacks and have privately approached Democratic leadership about doing so. Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t answer a question from a reporter Friday asking him to respond to the remarks from Mace, Ogles and others.