{"id":9540,"date":"2025-05-22T17:17:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T17:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/senate-gop-preps-for-one-big-beautiful-rewrite\/"},"modified":"2025-05-22T17:17:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T17:17:56","slug":"senate-gop-preps-for-one-big-beautiful-rewrite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/senate-gop-preps-for-one-big-beautiful-rewrite\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate GOP preps for \u2018one big, beautiful\u2019 rewrite"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Senate Republicans are vowing they will make changes to President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cbig, beautiful bill\u201d<\/a> after it passed the House early Thursday morning.<\/p>\n

While the end product is likely to contain sweeping areas of overlap with the proposal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson<\/a>, GOP senators made clear Thursday that the House bill can\u2019t pass without major changes. Some of the member demands are contradictory, with some fiscal hawks demanding beefed-up spending reductions while others want softening of the House\u2019s Medicaid language and to preserve more green-energy incentives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hoping now we\u2019ll actually start looking at reality,\u201d said Sen. Ron Johnson<\/a> (R-Wis.). \u201cI know everybody wants to go to Disney World, but we just can\u2019t afford it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson batted down the idea that he would fold under arm-twisting from Trump \u2014 much as his House counterparts did. \u201cListen, in the House, President Trump can threaten to primary [holdouts], and those guys want to keep their seats. I understand the pressure. Can\u2019t pressure me that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson said there are sufficient votes to block the bill if his party doesn\u2019t bend in his direction on spending reductions, including setting up a bicameral process for going \u201cline by line\u201d to find a total of roughly $6.5 trillion in cuts over the coming decade.<\/p>\n

One of the Republicans he believes is in his corner \u2014 Sen. Rand Paul<\/a> (R-Ky.) \u2014 said Thursday that while he supports the party\u2019s tax agenda, he cannot support the bill if it includes a debt ceiling hike. Republicans want to use the party-line bill to increase the debt ceiling until after the 2026 election without having to give concessions to Democrats.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think if you\u2019re going to raise the debt ceiling $4 or $5 trillion, it indicates that the project afoot isn\u2019t going to fix the deficit at all,\u201d Paul said. \u201cOnce Republicans vote for this, Republicans are going to own the deficit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader John Thune<\/a> can lose three GOP senators and still get the party-line bill \u2014 which ties a tax overhaul together with new border, defense and energy spending \u2014 through the chamber. Most Republicans view Paul as a hard \u201cno\u201d and acknowledge Johnson might be, as well.<\/p>\n

Thune wants to get the bill through the Senate by July 4, saying Thursday that holiday deadline is the \u201cgoal and the aspiration\u201d but will depend on “what does it take to get to 51?\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that he spoke to Trump after the House bill passed just hours before. “The president,\u201d he said, is \u201cvery happy\u201d and \u201cready to go to work with the Senate.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the fiscal hawks, Thune is facing a clutch of senators who have concerns about the House\u2019s language on a range of issues, including changes to Medicaid, the cancellation of green-energy tax credits and pushing some food-aid costs onto states.<\/p>\n

Trump spoke to one of the potential holdouts \u2014 Sen. Josh Hawley<\/a> (R-Mo.) \u2014 Wednesday night, though their conversation also touched on unrelated issues like disaster aid. Two others \u2014 Sens. Susan Collins<\/a> (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski<\/a> (R-Alaska) said they expected significant changes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some things that we want to address on the Medicaid side that I think are challenging for us in Alaska,\u201d Murkowski said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senate Republicans are vowing they will make changes to President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cbig, beautiful bill\u201d after it passed the House early Thursday morning. While the end product is likely to contain sweeping areas of overlap with the proposal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson, GOP senators made clear Thursday that the House bill can\u2019t pass without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}