Senate Republicans just approved their budget resolution after a more than 10-hour vote-a-rama. For now, it’s the GOP’s “Plan B,” as Trump’s preferred budget may not have the support to move ahead next week in the House.

Senators slogged through 25 roll-call votes on amendments as Democrats tried to squeeze the opposing party and lay the groundwork for 2026 attack ads.

Some Republicans grumbled about having to go through the exercise. Sen. Josh Hawley told reporters he spoke to Trump on Thursday evening, relaying that while the president did give a “little nod” towards the Senate budget in a Truth Social post, “He made clear to me … he wants one big, beautiful bill. He said that two or three times on the phone.”

Senators have insisted their resolution is just a back-up plan if Speaker Mike Johnson can’t get his one-bill version approved in the House. Still, Hawley wasn’t convinced — and neither, apparently, is Trump. Asked Thursday night why the Senate was still moving ahead on a strategy Trump doesn’t support, Hawley replied: “Great question. That’s sort of what he said to me.”

Four Republican senators sided several times with Democrats on amendment votes: Hawley and Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan. Hawley ended up voting for the budget resolution, making Sen. Rand Paul the only GOP holdout, along with all Democrats.

Some amendment fights you missed overnight:

• The Senate voted 49-51 to reject an amendment from Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth that would protect the right to fertility care and require insurers to cover in vitro fertilization. Duckworth called a recent IVF executive order from Trump “toothless, overly vague.” GOP Sen. Katie Britt called the amendment “nothing more than a Trojan horse” proposal that could allow for human cloning and “gene-edited designer babies.”
• Rand offered an amendment to add $1.5 trillion in spending cuts under the Senate plan, to mirror the slashing required under the House Republican budget. Senate Republicans were mostly a no, tanking the amendment 24-76.
• One of the only amendments adopted was a largely symbolic change offered by Sullivan to protect Medicare and Medicaid, though some Democrats argued that it would effectively raise the age of Medicare eligibility and cut benefits.

The battle is just getting started. The House and Senate need to adopt identical budget resolutions to move onto the next step: committees getting to work on recommendations for additional spending and funding cuts. And the House intends to take up a vastly different blueprint next week that would pave the way for one mammoth package on border, energy and tax policies rather than splitting off taxes into separate legislation.
Johnson is bullish he’ll find the support for his budget resolution next week, even as some of his members face constituent anger back in their districts over potential cuts. We’ll see if he’s able to muscle it through his narrow majority — and if senators will agree to throw out their budget if he does.

What else we’re watching:

• DOGE flak: A few Republicans are starting to take their concerns public. Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson lamented to a business group in his district that Trump’s executive orders are “getting out of control” and eroding Congress’ power (he later posted on X that he fully supports Trump’s agenda and wants Congress to make his executive actions permanent). Meanwhile, Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick was met with anger over DOGE’s cuts in a town hall, as well as possible cuts to Social Security and Medicaid. Reps. Cliff Bentz and Stephanie Bice also appeared to take some heat.
• Cue the stopgap: The chance that negotiators reach a funding deal before the March 14 shutdown deadline is diminishing. Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said negotiators “appear to be at an impasse,” while top Democratic appropriator Patty Murray said even if they do get a deal on toplines soon, they may need more time to assemble the 12 funding bills. 
• Donalds for governor: Rep. Byron Donalds is signaling he might run for Florida governor in 2026, after Trump said in a Truth Social post that the congressman would have his “total endorsement.” Donalds teased there was an “announcement coming soon.”

Senate Republicans are on track to adopt their budget resolution in the early hours of Friday morning — a bid to show support for a “Plan B” if House GOP lawmakers can’t unite around their more expansive vision for a party-line package necessary to enact President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.

Senators had voted on more than 10 amendments to their budget resolution before midnight, with plans to continue their “vote-a-rama” into the night. Democrats are using the marathon amendment process to score political points, hoping it will pay dividends in 2026.

“Families lose, billionaires win. That is the proposition at the heart of the Republican budget resolution,” the Senate Budget Committee’s top Democrat, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, said on the floor. “We will see tonight that Democrats vote against irreparable increases in the deficit, and Republicans vote to explode the deficit.”

Democrats have so far used the amendment free-for-all to repeatedly force their GOP colleagues to go on the record against protecting Medicare and Medicaid. They also offered amendments on stopping hedge funds from buying single-family homes, supporting wildland firefighters and rehiring federal workers who have been fired in the first weeks of the Trump administration.

Senate Democrats will be able to hone their attacks on Republicans’ party-line ambitions later, when GOP leaders in the chamber craft the actual reconciliation bill to deliver on Trump’s biggest policy priorities. The budget resolution, just 62-pages long, merely lays out the framework for the final product, which would allow for $150 billion in new defense spending and up to $175 billion in new spending on border security, plus require billions of dollars in savings from education, labor, energy and agriculture programs.

“One can predict where they’re going based on the numbers that they’re providing. Sure does look like Medicaid cuts in what they’re pushing for, and not small Medicaid cuts either. Huge Medicaid cuts,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a brief interview.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered an amendment to block Republicans from enacting tax cuts if the GOP cuts even $1 from Medicaid. At one point, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) attempted to give Republicans some cover, putting forward his own amendment that would establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting Medicare and Medicaid. A Senate Democratic leadership aide was quick to counter, in a memo to reporters, that the proposal would in effect raise the age of Medicare eligibility and “carve out populations Republicans deem worthy and cut benefits for everyone else.”

Democrats also characterized the Senate Republican budget as a plot to bankroll tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, and even their GOP counterparts wanted to talk about taxes. But the plan doesn’t set up tax cuts, with Senate Republicans arguing that should be tackled later in the year in separate legislation.

“While we aren’t considering tax policy as part of this reconciliation package, it’s important to set the record straight at what’s at stake in the upcoming tax debate,” Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said.

In some cases, Democrats were successful in getting Republicans to take the bait — to a point. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), for instance, backed Democrats in their attempts to allow floor votes on two amendments seeking to bar tax cuts for the wealthy in a final bill. Collins is a key target for Democrats in 2026, when she faces reelection.

While the budget measure GOP senators are working to adopt would lay the groundwork for a party-line package of energy policy, defense spending and border security investment, Trump is insistent on a more sweeping piece of legislation that also includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts. The House budget would lump all those priories together in what the president has called “one big, beautiful bill.”

Now the pressure is on House GOP leaders to show that they can rally enough support for that grander plan, which would require balancing the demands of fiscal conservatives with those of moderate Republicans unwilling to back deep cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP food assistance.

Ultimately, Senate Republicans are bracing themselves for the distinct possibility they’ll have to do this all again in the not so distant future, if House Republicans are able to advance their own budget resolution next week that would achieve the more expansive bill Trump has explicitly endorsed.

But Republicans did have one diversion Thursday night: The intense USA v. Canada hockey game was playing on a television inside the GOP cloakroom.

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley is starting talks with the White House about moving judicial nominees through his committee.

“The only discussion I’ve had is the process,” the Iowa Republican said in an interview this week. “Just with the White House Counsel.”

The update, however preliminary, signals the start of President Donald Trump’s relaunched efforts to transform the courts. Confirming hundreds of judges — including three Supreme Court justices — was a marquee achievement of Trump’s first term that is poised to leave the federal judiciary with a conservative slant for decades.

This time around, there aren’t many slots for Trump to fill: There are just 43 total vacancies in the federal judiciary, according to a database kept by the U.S. Court system.

Still, the White House is facing a series of roadblocks from judges confirmed in the Biden era, who are set on halting the administration’s unilateral moves to freeze funding and shut down agencies. And Trump needs all the sympathetic judges he can get.

As Grassley prepares to process judicial nominees through his panel, he’ll also be working with a critical ally: The White House has also recruited Steve Kenny, a former Grassley staffer and senior counsel at the Republican National Committee, as deputy counsel for nominations, according to a person with knowledge of the hire, granted anonymity to share personnel decisions that have not yet been formally announced. In that role, Kenny would be the lead liaison between the Judiciary Committee and the Trump administration as judges are nominated and sent to the Senate for confirmation hearings and votes.

Kenny was most recently a senior counsel for the Republican National Committee, but he was a counsel to Grassley during the lawmaker’s last time serving as chair of the Judiciary Committee between 2017 and 2019.