{"id":9944,"date":"2025-06-05T12:04:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T12:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/capitol-agenda-senate-says-salt-isnt-settled\/"},"modified":"2025-06-05T12:04:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T12:04:37","slug":"capitol-agenda-senate-says-salt-isnt-settled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/capitol-agenda-senate-says-salt-isnt-settled\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitol agenda: Senate says SALT isn\u2019t settled"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Pity Speaker Mike Johnson this morning.<\/p>\n

Not only does he have to deal with Elon Musk trying to sabotage the \u201cbig, beautiful bill,\u201d<\/a> Johnson is now staring down Senate tax writers who are doubling down on threats to scale back his carefully negotiated deal to raise the state-and-local-tax deduction cap.<\/p>\n

Senate Finance Republicans left the White House on Wednesday without decisions on key tax provisions in the bill. But two things are clear: Senators want to make President Donald Trump\u2019s business tax incentives permanent, not just extend them for five years as the House did. And to help pay the roughly half-trillion-dollar price, they\u2019re ready to carve up the House\u2019s deal to quadruple the SALT deduction limit.<\/p>\n

SALT Republicans don\u2019t have the same leverage in the Senate that they do in the House \u2014 because they simply don\u2019t exist in the other chamber.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s not a single [Republican] senator from New York or New Jersey or California,\u201d said Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). That means there’s not much appetite \u201cto do $353 billion for states that, basically, the other states subsidize.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Senate Republicans are keenly aware of the House\u2019s precarious math problem. If they send a package back to the House with significant SALT changes, it could derail the timeline for Trump\u2019s biggest legislative priority.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are sensitive to the fact that, you know, the speaker has pretty narrow margins, and there’s only so much that he can do to keep his coalition together,\u201d Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) told reporters. \u201cAt the same time it wouldn’t surprise people that the Senate would like to improve on their handiwork.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where\u2019s Trump? The president on Wednesday didn\u2019t directly tell lawmakers not<\/i> to meddle with the House\u2019s SALT deal. But he, too, is playing the numbers game. \u201cHe said, \u2018You do this, do we lose three votes here? If you do that, do you lose three votes here?\u2019\u201d Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters after the meeting.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader John Thune also conceded the difficult calculus on SALT, telling reporters \u201cwe understand that it\u2019s about 51 and 218\u201d and \u201cwe will work with our House counterparts and the White House\u201d to move the megabill.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a breakthrough elsewhere, though: With Commerce preparing to release its draft bill Thursday, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told Blue Light News Wednesday that he\u2019s satisfied a planned spectrum auction will protect national security, with specific frequencies used by the military shielded through 2034.<\/p>\n

One potential wrinkle: Rounds later suggested to Blue Light News that the deal that was still being finalized Wednesday<\/a> could look to free up other frequencies \u201cthat the business community is going to be concerned with.\u201d<\/p>\n

What else we’re watching: <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u2014 Appropriations moving:<\/b> Speaker Johnson plans to meet Thursday with top GOP appropriators about what funding totals to use in drafting the dozen government funding bills they\u2019ll write this summer. House Appropriations is forging ahead with markups Thursday on two of the 12 bills, even before GOP leaders and his dozen subcommittee chairs \u2014 \u201cthe cardinals\u201d \u2014 have settled on numbers for the full slate. <\/p>\n

\u2014 Senate Banking meeting: <\/b>Senate Banking Republicans will propose provisions<\/a> that would change the pay scale for Federal Reserve employees and zero out funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of the Senate version of the GOP megabill, according to a committee staff memo<\/a> obtained by Blue Light News. Banking Republicans are scheduled to meet Thursday morning to discuss the proposal.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Lutnick on Blue Light News (again):<\/b> Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is back on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify in front of House Appropriations. Expect him to be back in the hot seat after Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) grilled him on Wednesday over the Trump administration\u2019s tariffs. <\/p>\n

Jasper Goodman, John Hendel and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pity Speaker Mike Johnson this morning. Not only does he have to deal with Elon Musk trying to sabotage the \u201cbig, beautiful bill,\u201d Johnson is now staring down Senate tax writers who are doubling down on threats to scale back his carefully negotiated deal to raise the state-and-local-tax deduction cap. Senate Finance Republicans left the […]<\/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-9944","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\/9944","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=9944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}