President Trump hailed the passage of the mammoth GOP budget bill as offering "something for everyone," but the Senate legislation has landed with a thud among some House conservatives.
Many members of the lower chamber who have criticized the Senate's version of Trump's signature "big, beautiful bill" say their options now seem too few to fix it as the House takes up the legislation today.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be working uphill today to corral members, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) predicted in an interview Tuesday, describing the situation with the Senate bill as a "s---show."
"I cannot imagine they have the votes," she told Trump ally Steve Bannon by phone during his "War Room" podcast. "There is no way Johnson has the votes for this in the House."
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) has called the Senate bill a "dud" that "guts key Trump provisions."
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said the Senate's treatment of clean energy tax credits is not aggressive enough and called it "a deal-killer of an already bad deal."
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) suggested the House should send the bill back to the Senate and leave town.
Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) said in a social media post over the weekend, "I've been clear from the start that I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid."
At least six House Republicans were a "no" as of early this week.
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Valadao and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring, wrote to the Speaker in April along with 10 colleagues stating they would not support any reconciliation legislation that cut Medicaid for their vulnerable constituents.
Johnson can only afford three defections if all members are present and voting on the bill, which the House passed by a one-vote margin in May.
The Speaker is pushing to heed Trump's urging to get a bill to his desk by Friday, though acknowledged various complications, including major changes and weather impacting lawmakers getting to Washington.
"I'm not happy with what the Senate did to our product. We understand this is the process. It goes back and forth, and we'll be working to get all of our members to yes," Johnson told reporters Tuesday.
Even if the House sought to make changes and send the bill back to the Senate, the upper chamber left town Tuesday ahead of the July 4 holiday.
Johnson suggests his colleagues will have more options in the future, telling Fox News on Tuesday night that the House may consider two more budget reconciliation measures before the term ends in 2026.
"This is just a step in a sequence of events. We're intending to do more reconciliation work," he said, adding the House will rescind more previously appropriated spending and achieve additional savings through the appropriations process.
Trump took to social media to urge his party's "occasional 'GRANDSTANDERS'" to back down as the megabill heads to the House today, writing, "UNITED, have fun, and Vote 'YAY.'"
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said his caucus will work to try to slow the bill.
"All legislative tools and options are on the table," he said, including the so-called magic minute, which allows House leaders to speak for an unlimited amount of time on the floor.
The president clinched a major victory Tuesday with the Senate advancing the measure in a 51-50 vote, made possible by Vice President Vance's tiebreaking vote and a deal for Alaska's rural health care in exchange for backing by the state's Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R).
Three GOP senators ultimately voted against Trump's agenda bill — Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) — following a rollercoaster all-nighter of Senate amendments and debate, with lawmakers working throughout Monday and into Tuesday morning.
Collins, 72, who said last month she intends to seek a sixth term next year but has not yet formally announced a campaign, objected to more than $1 trillion in Medicaid reductions and the repercussions for rural health providers.
Paul voted no after objecting for months to lifting the nation's borrowing authority by $5 trillion as part of the gargantuan bill.
And Tillis, who announced he won't seek reelection next year, was a "no" vote after warning his GOP colleagues that slicing into Medicaid to achieve savings to offset GOP-favored tax cuts would be a political mistake ahead of the 2026 elections.
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The Speaker is fielding loud objections from within his GOP ranks that the House version of Trump's agenda is superior when it comes to cutting what conservatives call wasteful spending, fighting the nation's $36 trillion debt and securing U.S. borders.
"I've tried to … indicate to [the House] when they were moving their bill over there that we were going to be as conservative — or more so — than they are," Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told Semafor during an interview. "And in the end, we did."
The federal spending reductions in the sweeping Senate-passed bill amount to one of the largest retrenchments in the federal safety net in a generation. But the savings those cuts generate offset a fraction of the total cost of the bill, which is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to add more than $3 trillion to the federal debt by 2034.
The measure would extend and expand tax cuts, shrink the federal investments in Medicaid and food benefits, and end tax credits tied to clean energy and overhaul student loans. CNBC unpacked where the Senate ended up on the expansion of the state and local tax deduction, a key provision among House GOP moderates who represent districts in high-tax states.
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Murkowski urged the House to try to improve what came out of the Senate on Tuesday. "Did I get everything that I wanted? Absolutely not," she said.
"We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we're not there yet."
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