The top two Democratic congressional leaders stressed unity during their first joint appearance since a government funding fight put them on opposing sides and exposed deep rifts within the party.

“We are standing together in defense of the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters, adding that “House and Senate Democrats are united in defending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and nutritional assistance.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke after Jeffries: “We are all on the same page. Donald Trump is taking away things working people vitally need all to do tax cuts for the billionaires.”

The event was the first side-by-side appearance for Jeffries and Schumer since last month’s tussle over whether to advance a GOP-drafted government funding bill or trigger a government shutdown. Jeffries and all but one of his members voted “no” on the bill, while Schumer took a procedural vote to advance the legislation past a Senate filibuster. He ultimately voted against it.

Jeffries initially did not comment on whether he had lost confidence in Schumer, fueling rumors of a rift, then later indicated that he supports Schumer’s continued leadership.

On Tuesday, Schumer and Jeffries joined members of their leadership and the senior Democrats on the House and Senate Committees on Finance, Budget and Appropriations met to discuss their party’s strategy as Republicans prepare to move forward toward the “one big, beautiful bill” envisioned by President Donald Trump through the partisan, filibuster-skirting reconciliation process.

Senate Republicans are hoping to adopt a budget blueprint to pave the way for the reconciliation bill this week and send it to the House to be adopted before a two-week break. The House and Senate have to approve identical budget resolutions to be able to pass the eventual bill with a simple majority in the Senate.

The surprise of the first hearing of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets wasn’t about the identify of who shot John F. Kennedy. Instead it was about who wrote a conspiratorial book about it.

The Capitol Hill hearing held Tuesday in the aftermath of the 80,000-page document dump by the Trump administration last month about the 1963 assassination, came to a cringeworthy pause more than halfway through Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) asked filmmaker Oliver Stone about a book he wrote alleging that Lyndon Baines Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination.

Stone, who made the 1991 movie JFK which alleged a wide-ranging conspiracy behind the assassination but not focused on Kennedy’s vice president seemed confused by the question. Eventually another witness, former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, worked out that Boebert had confused Oliver Stone with Roger Stone, the political consultant and longtime Trump confidante.

Boebert sheepishly paused and said “I may have misinterpreted that. I apologize.”

The hearing was chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) only minutes after her triumph over Speaker Mike Johnson in an effort to force a vote on her proposal to allow proxy voting for new parents in Congress. Stone was urging the committee to fully investigate the 62-year-old crime.

Luna, who has indicated deep skepticism about Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin, hailed the hearing as an “historical day in our nation’s history” and described to her efforts to uncover the truth about the death of the 35th president as crucial to ensuring that “what happened to President Kennedy can never happen again.”

Democrats though were less focused on Kennedy and more focused on Donald Trump. They took shots at the slapdash nature of the document release by the White House, which left the personal information of a number of former congressional staffers exposed, as well as taking shots at the Trump administration over the fallout of top officials communicating via Signal.

Senate Republican leaders said Tuesday they are sticking with their plan to approve a budget blueprint this week and move forward with President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda, even as they continue to scramble behind the scenes to lock down the necessary votes.

The projections of confidence came after a closed-door meeting where GOP senators debated key unresolved points, including how deeply Republicans are prepared to cut federal spending amid angst from fiscal hawks over leaders’ developing plan that embeds only modest deficit-cutting goals into the budget plan itself.

“We just keep having the same conversation,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said exiting the meeting. “But I do think, you know, there’s 50 people at least willing to move forward on this portion of it.”

Forward movement is precisely what Republican leaders want to show, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters he remains “hopeful” the budget framework — a key prerequisite for the GOP’s planned party-line bill — will get rubber-stamped in his chamber this week.

Still, several GOP senators said they were withholding their support, saying they still had not seen a final draft of the framework and didn’t fully understand the strategy their leaders were pursuing. Senate Republicans are hoping to circulate a final plan as soon as Tuesday night.

“I need to see some text,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) after the lunch.

Inside the meeting, GOP leaders sought to tamp down another source of anxiety: whether House hard-liners would accept the Senate’s more modest deficit-reduction goals or send it back for another grueling series of overnight votes. According to Hawley, Senate leaders said they believed the House would accept what the Senate sends over.

House leaders, meanwhile, are preparing to muscle whatever the Senate can deliver through their own chamber next week, finalizing the budget blueprint and paving the way for action on the actual bill combining tax cuts with border security, defense plus-ups, energy incentives and more.

One critical unanswered question is whether Republicans will be able to slap a zero-dollar price tag on an extension of the 2017 tax cuts or whether they’ll have to deal with their estimated $4 trillion-plus cost.

Republicans have been preparing for weeks to seek an answer from the Senate’s parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who has been informally reviewing arguments on whether it’s possible for the GOP to embrace an accounting tactic known as a “current policy baseline” to write off the cost of the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

But some Senate Republicans have started arguing publicly this week that a formal ruling from MacDonough might not be necessary. Instead, she could informally advise Republicans that the decision belongs instead to Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), according to two GOP aides who were granted anonymity to describe private deliberations.

Republican senators were told during the Tuesday lunch that they did not in fact need a formal ruling, according to one GOP senator in attendance, and the two top leaders told reporters much the same afterward.

“We think the law is very clear, and ultimately the budget committee chairman makes that determination,” Thune said. “But obviously we are consulting regularly with the parliamentarian.”

“It’s not a ruling by the parliamentarian,“ Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 2 GOP leader, added. “The Budget chair gets to decide which baseline to use.”

Others with direct knowledge said they still expected MacDonough to meet with Republican and Democratic aides as early as Tuesday evening to hash out the tax-scoring questions. Getting a favorable ruling would give Republicans much more room to enact permanent tax cut extensions while piling on other tax provisions favored by Trump.

Whatever baseline Republicans end up embracing, Thune still needs to win over a handful of fiscal hawks who want steeper spending cuts than the $2 trillion “aspirational” goal that is currently under discussion in the Senate but is not expected to be spelled out in the guidelines the Senate gives its committees.

Instead, Senate GOP leaders are planning to pursue a bare-bones approach, instructing their committees to find a minimum of only a few billion in savings compared with the House’s $1.5 trillion floor for deficit reduction. The fiscal hawks want steeper spending cuts written into the legislation, with some floating deficit reduction targets as high as $6.5 trillion.

“We’ll have to get that before we move forward,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, who has been pushing for steeper cuts.

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.