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. 

A key Republican threw cold water Tuesday on calls by GOP colleagues to impeach federal judges, suggesting the proposals were politically symbolic but were unlikely to pass.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said some House Republicans may be introducing impeachment bills “because they were popular and felt strongly within their district, whether or not they were moving anywhere.”

Issa, the chair of a House Judiciary subcommittee on the courts, asked former Speaker Newt Gingrich if he agreed with that assessment. Gingrich, who was testifying as a former Congressional leader, concurred that impeachment proposals have little chance of passing.

“They’re political symbols, not legislative symbols,” Gingrich responded, grinning.

The exchange came during a hearing Tuesday, chaired by Issa, on what Republicans claim has been “judicial overreach” during the early weeks of the Trump administration. Despite calls by President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and a small band of allies in Congress — frustrated by dozens of court orders that have declared key Trump policies illegal or unconstitutional — there’s been little momentum among House GOP leaders, who have privately insisted such efforts are going nowhere in the closely divided Capitol.

Issa instead sought to rally support for his own legislation that would limit the ability of judges to impose nationwide blocks on presidential policies they deem improper. He emphasized that, despite Democrats’ remarks, impeachment was not the focus of the hearing.

Without the votes in the House for impeachment, GOP leadership has been looking for an outlet for the fervor within the party’s conservative flank to target specific judges who have drawn Trump’s fury. Issa argued during the hearing that district court judges have far exceeded their constitutional powers, calling their rulings “the new resistance to the Trump administration.”

“Time and time again, rogue judges have asserted as though they were five of the nine members of the Supreme Court,” Issa said. “The reality is, every judge is considering himself not to be an associate justice, not to even be the chief justice, but, in fact, to be a combination of the Justice and the President of the United States. This demands that we take a, make a change and make it quickly.”

Democrats, however, argued that the courts were functioning as a legitimate and necessary check on a president who has pushed the boundaries of the law and Constitution in unprecedented ways. It’s no accident, they argued, that Trump has faced more judicial resistance than his predecessors, who tailored policies to survive court scrutiny.

They repeatedly asked Republicans to speak to the calls from the right flank of the party for impeachments, as GOP lawmakers in the hearing shied away from the topic. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Republicans’ calls for impeachment have devolved into threats against and intimidation of federal officials.

“I call on my colleagues right now to call off the campaign to impeach federal judges for doing their jobs,” he said.

There was some skepticism from at least one House Republican to GOP efforts to limit the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) noted that Republicans cheered nationwide injunctions during the Biden administration, when judges blocked several of his most sweeping policy efforts.

“This is a double-edged sword. He did unlawful and unconstitutional things during covid that were stopped with nationwide injunctions,” Massie said. “I’m torn on this.”

Nine House Republicans voted with Democrats Tuesday to reject Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to block a GOP member from allowing lawmakers who are new parents to cast their votes by proxy vote.

House Republican leaders inserted language into a procedural measure that would effectively kill Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s proxy-voting proposal, which is due to come to the floor later this week. Luna had circumvented party leaders by successfully pursuing a discharge petition.

That measure failed on a 222-206 vote, with eight Republicans joining Luna to block it.

Approving the “rule,” as the measure is known, would have tabled the discharge petition and blocked future similar proposals, leading Luna and other Republicans to line up against it. Luna and 11 other House Republicans had signed onto the discharge petition to force consideration of the proxy-voting measure.

The proposal has roiled House Republicans, with Luna opting to leave the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus over the dispute.

GOP leadership, with the support of conservative hard-liners, has opposed the proxy-voting proposal, calling it unconstitutional.

But the failure of Tuesday afternoon’s vote spells trouble for the rest of the House GOP’s plans this week. In addition to blocking Luna’s bill, the rule would have teed up the rest of the legislative agenda, including a closely watched measure to rein in federal judges who have opposed President Donald Trump.