Congress
Senate GOP scrambles to rewrite Trump’s megabill
Senate Republicans are scrambling to rewrite major parts of their “big, beautiful bill” in deference to key holdouts and the chamber’s parliamentarian as the clock ticks on a self-imposed deadline.
GOP leaders are aiming to start voting Thursday, but senators emerged from a closed-door briefing on the status of the megabill Monday night saying that some of their biggest sticking points — ranging from key tax decisions to a deal on Medicaid — remain unresolved.
The multitude of unresolved issues has left Republicans unsure when the bill will get to the Senate floor, even as leaders project confidence they are on track to pass it and send it back to the House this week — setting up final passage ahead of their July 4 target.
Most crucially, it could be Wednesday night or later before Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough finishes ruling on whether major tax provisions, including some measures at the very heart of the domestic policy bill, pass muster under the budget rules GOP lawmakers want to use to pass their bill on party lines.
“I think we’ll eventually pass something, I just can’t tell you when,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “We’ve got a lot of stuff to work out, and the bill will be changed on the floor.”
Republicans had initially hoped to have a revised bill ready to be released Monday. Now they aren’t expected to release it while the parliamentarian’s review — the so-called “Byrd bath” — is pending, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking.
Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said that he hoped to be able to hold an initial vote on Thursday, setting up passage over the weekend, but that “part of it right now is the Byrd bath, and it’s taking a little bit longer.”
It’s not just the procedural hoops senators have to jump through. Multiple substantive matters need to be settled, including a high-stakes dispute between the House and Senate GOP over a key tax break.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) briefed his colleagues on talks he’s brokering with House Republicans on raising the state-and-local-tax deduction cap, known as SALT. Mullin signaled afterward he thought they were getting close to “acceptance” on what the final proposal would entail.
A $40,000 cap negotiated by the House would not be touched, he suggested, but an income threshold where the deduction starts to phase out could be lowered. But that combination was publicly rejected by SALT-focused House members just days ago, and several GOP senators left the briefing under the impression that Mullin was only laying out potential options and did not have anything resolved.
Beyond the tax fight, Republicans are still working through thorny Medicaid issues. Thune told GOP senators during the closed-door meeting that the Senate would follow the House’s lead in one key respect — it would not change the share of Medicaid costs the federal government pays for those enrolled under the program’s 2010 expansion, according to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
GOP leaders also discussed including a fund to help offset the impact to rural hospitals due to other Medicaid changes in the Senate bill. Blue Light News reported Monday that the fund is expected to be included in the bill, but Republicans say they have not yet gotten details on how it would work.
“I am absolutely happy with a rural fund; I think that would be great,” Hawley said. “Will that solve the issue? I don’t know.”
Senate Republicans included language in their bill to curtail provider taxes, which most states use to fund their Medicaid programs and garner larger federal reimbursements. House GOP leaders, who chose only to freeze those taxes, are increasingly worried that they’ll have to spend weeks more negotiating the megabill if the Senate doesn’t quickly retreat from some of its proposed changes.
Hawley said that he has been talking to House leaders who are warning that the language can’t pass their chamber, necessitating a time-consuming “conference” with the Senate. Speaker Mike Johnson has urged senators to keep their changes to the House-passed bill to a minimum but senators have eyed major changes to the tax package while sanding down some of the proposed spending cuts.
At Monday’s briefing, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina handed out a paper that estimated how much Medicaid funding several states, including his and Hawley’s, would lose under the Senate provider tax proposal.
Republicans are also getting heartburn as MacDonough warns that several key provisions do not comply with the strict rules governing what can be included under reconciliation, which lets them skirt a 60-vote filibuster.
For instance, a plan to shift some food-aid costs to states, generating tens of billions of dollars in savings, is in flux after MacDonough ruled over the weekend that the scheme, which penalized states for their payment error rate, did not comply. Senate Agriculture Committee Republicans are hoping they can salvage the plan with relatively small changes.
Losing the cost-sharing proposal would be a setback for leadership, which is already facing pushback from House and Senate conservatives who believe the bill doesn’t go far enough on cutting spending. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, warned Monday that if the bill “should pass the Senate in its current rumored form, it probably would have trouble in the House.”
MacDonough has also warned that an effort championed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to overhaul the federal rulemaking process does not comply with reconciliation rules, but Republicans expect Lee could try to revive it as a floor amendment. Lee and Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) met separately with Trump on Monday as the president steps up his efforts to win over the trio of outspoken fiscal conservatives. Trump, according to Scott, said that he supports full repeal of clean energy tax credits enacted under predecessor Joe Biden, as well as a focus on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid.
Senate conservatives later relayed Trump’s message Monday evening to a closed-door Freedom Caucus meeting, according to four people granted anonymity to describe the gathering.
The centerpiece of the GOP package — its tax and health care language — remains under review with MacDonough. Senate Finance Committee staff met with her Monday to discuss the health provisions and are expected to reconvene on Tuesday to go over the tax language.
Final rulings are not expected to be finished until Wednesday at the earliest — less than a day before Thune wants senators to start voting.
Meredith Lee Hill and Benjamin Guggenheim 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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