Congress

House Republicans wanted the Senate to fix their megabill. They ‘miscalculated.’

Published

1 year ago

July 1, 2025

It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected.

Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda more politically explosive.

GOP senators made steeper cuts to Medicaid, hastened cuts to wind and solar energy tax credits and also managed to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit compared to the House plan.

Usually, it’s far-right conservatives in the House proposing politically precarious policies, leaving the careful moderates in the Senate — the “cooling saucer,” according to the old Hill cliche — to dial them back.

This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP’s chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along.

That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had “miscalculated.”

“We are a more conservative body,” Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who “cringe at the sound of any word that starts with ‘Medi.’”

As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they’re not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts.

“We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That’s the main difference,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated.

No permanence enemies

In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders’ vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks.

“The bill includes over $500 billion in new spending, and at the end to get the vote of the Alaska senator, billions and billions more were added,” said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the three Republicans who voted against the bill Tuesday.

House members, he added, are “going to look at it and see that it’s much less conservative than it started out to be and it’s going to add much more to the debt.”

Strict Senate budget rules also meant that some House spending cuts had to be scaled back or dropped altogether, so senators had to dig deep to find offsets elsewhere — especially given the $466 billion cost of adding the permanent business tax cuts to the bill versus just extending them through 2029, as the House did.

Yet there was no serious discussion about leaving those tax cuts behind. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo and other tax-writing Republicans considered it their top priority. Thune called it a red line for many of his members, and it was one that ultimately influenced some of the Senate’s most politically fraught decisions.

Thune drove a strategy that cut more deeply into Medicaid that many expected.

In an interview after the bill’s passage, Thune acknowledged that the decision to make the business tax cuts permanent impacted the savings and overall strategy for the bill.“We really believed that permanence was the key to economic growth because it creates certainty,” he said. “All the models that we saw showed that you got more growth with permanence.”

To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump’s marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses.

Even more explosive, however, is how they chose to wring additional savings out of Medicaid. The joint federal-state health program had already emerged as a political hornet’s nest in the House, where members balked at various proposals that would turn off the federal money spigot and force states to kick residents off their health plans.

Eventually the House landed on a compromise proposal of capping medical provider taxes, a popular financing mechanism for state Medicaid programs. Many Republicans objected, but it beat several alternatives, such as explicitly reducing the federal cost share formula for Medicaid enrollees.

Medicaid backlash

Many Republican senators prepared to make their peace with the proposal, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said in a Monday interview that he was privately prepared to accept the House’s provider tax cap with minor tweaks after a hospital association in his state formally blessed it.

But before Hawley could announce his support, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft that discarded the freeze and instead drastically scaled down the tax. Instead of waving a white flag, Hawley went on the warpath, urging Thune to drop the Senate proposal and backchanneling with House leadership to undermine it.

Hawley, who described himself as “stunned” by the Senate’s provider tax language, said he never got an explanation for why leadership went down that route. In the interview, he held up and rubbed his fingers together — indicating that he believed they were looking for money.

“I think it’s a matter of our mark, the Senate mark, made a lot more of the business tax cuts permanent,” he said.

While leadership was ultimately able to get Hawley on board — he won approval for a radiation victims compensation fund he’s championed and other smaller goodies — the decision to go deeper on Medicaid lost Republicans two key senators during the final vote on Tuesday afternoon — Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis.

Collins and Tillis ended up being two of the three

Both purple-state senators urged the Senate to revert to the House Medicaid language. Tillis privately warned leaders the Senate proposal would devastate his state and cost him reelection. Days later, he announced he would not run again and publicly torched the bill, saying it would “betray the promise Donald Trump made.”

The Senate’s Medicaid swerve has also put Speaker Mike Johnson in a bind. When he was locking down support for the House to pass its version of the bill, he privately reassured his members that the Senate would soften his chamber’s Medicaid cuts. Over the past week, he continued to reiterate to them that the Senate would end up closer to what the House passed. Now, he has to explain to increasingly frustrated House moderates why that didn’t happen.

But even as House Republicans were publicly banking on the Senate to soften the Medicaid cuts, Senate Republicans were pushing to go further. During an early June Finance Committee meeting with Trump at the White House, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming described to the president how the provider tax amounted to “money laundering” and would constitute cracking down on fraud, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions.

The parliamentarian and the billionaire

Other unpredictable events forced Senate Republicans to lose out on hundreds of billions of dollars in savings. After lengthy debates between Republican and Democratic staff in June, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that upward of $200 billion in House offsets would have to be left out of the bill because they didn’t comply with Senate budget rules.

House Republicans had also banked on $116 billion in revenue from retaliatory taxes aimed at dissuading foreign countries from implementing digital levies and a global minimum tax that the GOP detests. Shortly after the Senate included the proposal in its text — and a freakout by analysts on Wall Street — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a deal with G7 countries on the global tax and asked for the retaliatory taxes to be removed.

Other changes, like sharp cuts to certain clean-energy tax credits, seemed spurred more by politics than fiscal considerations. After the megabill passed the House in May, far-right influencers and lawmakers got increasingly vocal about what they perceived as deeply unfair subsidies to green industries.

Trump began calling Thune to urge him to take an axe to wind and solar energy incentives that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden, even after softened language backed by Senate moderates was inserted into the Finance Committee text. Trump told the same to Senate conservatives, many of whom had been swayed by fossil-fuel advocate Alex Epstein. They invited Epstein to address a Senate lunch in June to win over skeptical colleagues.

Bessent's late interventions killed a major source of tax-cut offsets.

Even a late intervention from the world’s richest man couldn’t move the needle. Elon Musk publicly lashed out at Republicans for scaling back the tax credits, including making a public appeal to Speaker Mike Johnson to keep them online. He also personally approached Thune in recent days as the Senate debated the bill. Thune declined to comment on the conversation, but afterward Musk continued attacking the bill, arguing that it would hurt America’s ability to compete with China.

Senate holdouts did manage to clinch the removal of a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects in 11th-hour negotiations, as well as a carve-out from the phaseouts for projects that start construction immediately. But the harsh language pushed by Epstein, which required most other wind and solar projects to be placed in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the incentives, stayed in the final Senate product.

Tillis, liberated of political niceties after announcing his retirement, railed against the clean-energy changes on the Senate floor on Sunday, arguing that they would gut power projects that are already being developed.

Taking aim at Epstein, Tillis chalked up the changes to “people who have never worked a day in this industry, maybe philosophized and written a few white papers on it, but haven’t gotten their hands dirty.”

Ben Jacobs contributed to this report.

Congress

Capitol agenda: GOP mum on returning Miller’s campaign cash

Published

3 minutes ago

August 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Max Miller gave more than $70,000 in campaign cash to over a dozen congressional Republicans in the cycle’s most competitive races.

So far, most of those members aren’t saying whether or not they will return it.

The Dependable Conservative Leadership PAC kicked money to 16 vulnerable GOP candidates for Congress, according to FEC filings. The PAC is aligned with Miller, who has continued his reelection bid while denying allegations of domestic abuse.

The donations put these members in a politically delicate position as they have welcomed the cash in their fights to hold onto their seats this November — and help the party protect its fragile majorities in both chambers.

Spokespeople in the congressional and campaign offices for 13 of the 16 candidates who took the Miller-aligned money did not respond to requests for comment on if they planned to return the funding.

Only the campaign for Rep. Brad Finstad said it had already returned its contribution.

Meanwhile, a campaign spokesperson for Rep. Mike Lawler said the incumbent Republican had no plans to relinquish the money. He instead slammed Democratic challenger Cait Conley for attending a fundraiser hosted by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 after allegations of involvement in a prostitution ring.

And Derrick Van Orden, asked Tuesday night about the contribution he received from Miller during about an interview about the results of his state’s primary elections, refused to discuss the matter, calling the accusations against Miller “allegations” he had heard about “the day before yesterday.”

The recipients of Miller’s campaign cash who didn’t respond to inquiries include: Reps. Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Zach Nunn, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Nick Begich III, Tom Barrett, Juan Ciscomani, Gabe Evans, Tom Kean Jr., Jen Kiggans, and David Valadao.

Sen. Jon Husted is also staying quiet about whether he’ll return the cash. He previously said Miller should not run for reelection after Emily Miller — Max Miller’s ex-wife and Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno‘s daughter — accused her former husband of assaulting herself and their young child.

Democrats are already seizing on the matter, with a campaign spokesperson for Mackenzie’s opponent, Bob Brooks, saying in a statement the GOP incumbent is “open for business for whoever’s willing to pay up, no questions asked.”

Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Tuesday Democrats are “shameless hypocrites who conveniently look the other way when their vulnerable members are bankrolled by scandal-plagued Democrats like [former Rep.] Eric Swalwell.”

The NRCC also claimed that some of the Democrats who said they’d give away Swalwell campaign contributions have, in fact, not returned the money as promised.

Unlike Miller, Swalwell resigned in April and ended his gubernatorial bid in California amid intense pressure from inside his own party over sexual assault allegations he denies.

What else we’re watching:

— NANCY PELOSI CORRECTS THE RECORD ON BIDEN: For the first time, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed what she told President Joe Biden before he withdrew his 2024 presidential reelection bid. “I only said to President Biden, ‘I’ve come to question the polling that you have and how your campaign is being conducted. I think there has to be a better campaign to win the White House,’” she shared Tuesday. Pelosi’s comments — shared on stage with Jonathan Martin at Blue Light News’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit — shed new light on the scramble that led to Biden dropping his campaign. But she pushed back on the narrative that she puppeteered the president’s withdrawal. She added she advised Biden to hear from outside pollsters and told him, “I think the public would like to hear that you’ve had testing that demonstrates that you can serve.”

— JEFFRIES VAGUE ON IMMIGRATION AGENDA: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday said Democrats are “committed to an accountability agenda” on immigration should they take the majority. But the New Yorker offered few specifics on what immigration policies a future House Democratic majority might pursue. “We’ll have a conversation about what dramatic change looks like” after November, Jeffries said, adding that what “unites the entirety of the House Democratic caucus family” is that “immigration enforcement should be fair, just and humane in this country.”

Riley Rogerson and Joey Fox contributed to this report.

Congress

Republicans stay mum on whether they’ll return campaign cash from embattled Max Miller

Published

3 hours ago

August 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Max Miller has kicked campaign cash to more than a dozen fellow Republicans competing in some of the midterm’s tightest races. Few are saying whether they now have plans to return the money as the Ohio lawmaker seeks reelection despite serious allegations of domestic abuse.

According to records filed with the Federal Elections Commission, Miller’s Dependable Conservative Leadership PAC has made contributions to 16 GOP incumbents struggling to hold onto their seats in Congress.

The money — more than $70,000 in all — has largely been donated in increments of $1,000, $2,500 or $5,000. In a few cases, such as with Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), the PAC maxed out with $10,000 donations.

Of these 16 Republicans who received money from Miller this cycle contacted this week by Blue Light News, only the campaign for Rep. Brad Finstad of Minnesota said it had already returned its $5,000 contribution.

A campaign spokesman for Lawler, meanwhile, said the incumbent Republican had no plans to relinquish the money, noting that Democratic challenger Cait Conley had attended a fundraiser hosted for her by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal.

But spokespeople in the congressional offices and campaigns for the other 14 candidates did not return requests for comment, underscoring the uncomfortable situation Republicans find themselves in as they seek to distance themselves from Miller without giving up any cash advantage in the final weeks leading up to the November elections.

Those staying silent now include Husted, who is facing a tough election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Husted said Miller should not run for reelection after Emily Miller — Max Miller’s ex-wife and fellow Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno’s daughter — accused her former husband of assaulting her and their young child.

Miller has denied the accusations. Spokespeople for his campaign and PAC did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Republican candidates who have remained quiet in recent days about whether they’ll give Miller back his money are Pennsylvania Reps. Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick, as well as Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

They also include Reps. Nick Begich III of Alaska, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, David Valadao of California and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.

Van Orden, asked Tuesday night about the $2,500 contribution he received from Miller during about an interview about the results of his state’s primary elections, refused to discuss the matter, calling the accusations against Miller “allegations” he had heard about “the day before yesterday.”

Miller will be the GOP candidate on the ballot this fall in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District after he rejected calls to get out of the race before a legal deadline this past week to replace him — forcing Republicans to support him if they want the party to hold onto the seat. Members of President Donald Trump’s political team also urged Ohio Republicans to hold off on a public pressure campaign to get Miller to drop out so as not to risk the party appearing ununified.

Polling now shows Miller trailing his Democratic challenger, Brian Poindexter, which could force the GOP to spend precious resources in a district that would otherwise be safely red — and possibly cost them a seat Trump won by double digits. Poindexter, a city councilmember and union ironworker, was added Tuesday to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red-to-blue” program, reserved for congressional candidates who are seen as standing a chance of flipping a Republican-held seat.

But Miller’s baggage may not be confined to his race alone. Some Democrats are already using the unreturned campaign donations as fodder to hammer Republicans running in other contests around the country.

“Ryan doesn’t care,” said Benny Stanislawski, communications director for Democrat Bob Brooks, in attacking Brooks’ opponent Mackenzie. “That’s who he is: open for business for whoever’s willing to pay up, no questions asked.”

Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement Tuesday called Democrats “shameless hypocrites who conveniently look the other way when their vulnerable members are bankrolled by scandal-plagued Democrats like [former Rep.] Eric Swalwell.”

The NRCC also claimed that some of the Democrats who said they’d give away Swalwell campaign contributions have, in fact, not returned the money as promised.

“Nobody should take these slimeballs seriously when their supposed principles disappear the second they become politically inconvenient,” Marinella added of Democrats.

Unlike Miller, Swalwell resigned in April and ended his gubernatorial bid in California amid intense pressure from inside his own party over sexual assault allegations he denies.

Viet Shelton, a spokesperson with the DCCC, shot back that it is, in fact, Republicans who “spend all their time virtue signaling about how self righteous they are just to turn around and take dirty money from disgraced, disgusting, and abhorrent men … They should stop with the fake outrage.”

Some House Republicans continue to rally around Miller as the party seeks to hold onto its razor-thin majority: Just last week, Miller and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.)filed a new joint fundraising committee with the FEC.

Lunasaid in a recent text message to POLITICO that she would not get in the middle of a private matter between the Millers. Tuesday night, she said the committee was “not active,” adding: “nothing more to it.”

Samuel Benson, Lisa Kashinsky, Madison Fernandez and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

Paramount lawyer says company ‘happy to cooperate’ as Democrats vow crackdown on merger

Published

11 hours ago

August 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democratic lawmakers are readying aggressive oversight of Paramount Skydance’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount’s top lawyer said Tuesday the company is “happy to cooperate.”

“We’re not naive to know that politics does not exist,” Paramount Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim said. “We’re not shocked about that. We’ll be happy to cooperate and really engage with Republicans and Democrats about any issue and aspect. This merger is actually going to be good not only for California, it’ll be good for America.”

Paramount has been “transparent” and responsive to lawmaker’s concerns,” Delrahim — who served as Trump’s antitrust chief in his first administration — said at Blue Light News’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit.

The merger of the media companies has become a flashpoint for Democratic outcry, as the party outlines a range of grievances that could resurface as a sweeping oversight effort if they take control of one or both chambers of Congress next year. Top Democrats already insist Paramount CEO David Ellison and his company have been less than forthcoming.

Democrats have blasted Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery as a gross antitrust violation with serious national security implications due in part to the involvement of foreign investment in the deal. And they have slammed Ellison for paying a $16 million settlement to President Donald Trump, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts claimed could be “bribery in plain sight” in exchange for the administration’s approval of the company’s merger with Skydance last year.

Ellison also last week tried to tamp down Democratic concerns he would influence the independence of news network BLN after the deal, after Paramount’s takeover of CBS News last year led to outrage from journalists that leadership was pressing for more favorable coverage of the Trump administration.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is leading 12-states in a lawsuit to block the company’s current merger with Warner Bros., and last week, a federal judge scheduled a March trial to decide whether the acquisition violates antitrust law. Paramount agreed to punt the merger until next year — precisely when Democrats hope to be back in power.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement to Blue Light News that Ellison “has evaded Congressional oversight of his work to create a mega-media empire designed to serve Donald Trump’s political agenda. If he thinks he can run out the clock on Congressional scrutiny of his massive media mergers and blockbuster corporate deals, he’s mistaken.”

Raskin called the investigation a “priority” and said “anyone involved should be prepared to answer under oath for their role in this brazen campaign to bend America’s free press to Donald Trump’s political, financial and personal will.”

Presented with Raskin’s statement, Delrahim said, “You can allege all you want. There is no corruption here.”

“We’d be happy to engage with Congressman Raskin and provide him, as we have, information,” Delrahim continued. “It sounds good, and I get it. It’s politics. But we respect his role and his important role in oversight. But just because he said so doesn’t mean that there is any corruption.”