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\n

John Thune is wasting no time moving President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cbig, beautiful bill\u201d through the Senate.<\/p>\n

The Senate majority leader laid out a rat-a-tat tempo for the coming weeks in an exclusive interview with Blue Light News that he hopes will culminate in final passage of the party-line megabill by Republicans\u2019 July 4 deadline.<\/p>\n

Senate committees will fully release revised text of the bill<\/a> by the end of next week, Thune said. Panel markups where that text might be debated and potentially amended will be highly optional. And he is already in close consultation with Trump about targeting key senators who will need to be persuaded to back the sprawling legislation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe’s been very engaged,\u201d the South Dakota Republican said. \u201cI think he would do that whether we asked [or not], but we tried to give him some direction, yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thune laid out the detailed timeline after Blue Light News first reported Monday that some Senate panels will start releasing their tweaks this week \u2014 starting with the Armed Services Committee Tuesday night.<\/p>\n

Next week, panels writing the trickiest and most substantial parts \u2014 including the Senate Finance Committee \u2014 will release text. Trump will meet with other Republican members of the tax-writing panel at the White House Wednesday and \u201clay out kind of what he wants to see,\u201d Thune said.<\/p>\n

Now five months into his longtime dream job, Thune is tasked with shepherding his party\u2019s biggest legislative priority to fruition with little margin for error. Republicans need to figure out how to corral nearly all their members while bridging internal divides on thorny issues such as the size of spending cuts, the future of social safety net programs and the architecture of major tax policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s striking the right balance,\u201d Thune said. \u201cWithout getting into the particulars, there are a ton of tradeoffs you have to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

He compared trying to lock down the bill to playing a game of Whac-A-Mole but added that he believes he has \u201ca handle on what the dials are and how they can be turned and what the various options are to try to get to 51.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thune has at least one guaranteed \u201cno\u201d vote in Sen. Rand Paul, with the Kentucky Republican vowing to oppose the bill as long as an increase in the debt ceiling is included. Thune noted that he\u2019s spoken extensively with Sen. Ron Johnson, a deficit hawk whom leadership views as their second-most-likely opponent<\/a>. Meeting the Wisconsin Republican\u2019s public demands of trillions of dollars in additional spending cuts will be a tall order, Thune acknowledged.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never give up,\u201d Thune said, and leaders are \u201cdoing everything we can to move the bill in a direction that he would be more predisposed to be for. But, you know, he’s made some fairly strong statements out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, everybody’s going to have to make a decision about whether or not this is better than the status quo, and, do I really want to take this down?\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Trump has already started calling some senators who will be Thune\u2019s toughest votes to lock down, with Thune calling him \u201cthe closer.\u201d It\u2019s not just conservative hard-liners who need attention: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters on Tuesday that she has spoken with administration officials about her concerns about the potential impact on rural hospitals<\/a>. Trump also called Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has raised concern about the House\u2019s changes to Medicaid. Thune and Hawley have met to discuss his position.<\/p>\n

Thune is also trying to coordinate with Speaker Mike Johnson, who has urged the Senate to make as few changes as possible to the House bill. But Thune said that was an unrealistic expectation \u2014 particularly on the state-and-local-tax deduction, an especially tough issue in the House.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be very, very hard to get the Senate to vote for what the House did\u201d on SALT, Thune said. \u201cWe\u2019ve just got some people that feel really strongly on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other areas that could see changes include SNAP, the nutrition program formerly known as food stamps. Thune acknowledged \u201ca concern among some of our members\u201d about the House\u2019s plan to require states to carry some of the program\u2019s cost.<\/p>\n

Thune met with Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) Tuesday, and leadership has given the panel a list of potential savings options that would not require shifting costs to the states.<\/p>\n

The process of tweaking the bill will largely happen behind closed doors in the coming weeks. Thune said it will be up to each Senate committee to decide whether to hold votes on their piece of the bill. While he said he believes some will, no panel has yet announced it will do so.<\/p>\n

After the Finance panel \u2014 which has jurisdiction over both the tax and Medicare provisions \u2014 releases its text sometime next week, Senate Republicans will \u201cfine tune\u201d the bill, Thune said, during the third week of the month to ensure it can get 51 votes \u2014 possibly including a tie-breaker from Vice President JD Vance.<\/p>\n

\u201cProbably in the last two weeks of [June], we really start homing in on, you know, getting ready to get it to the floor the last week,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Thune is wasting no time moving President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cbig, beautiful bill\u201d through the Senate. The Senate majority leader laid out a rat-a-tat tempo for the coming weeks in an exclusive interview with Blue Light News that he hopes will culminate in final passage of the party-line megabill by Republicans\u2019 July 4 deadline. Senate […]<\/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-9900","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\/9900","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=9900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}