The “big, beautiful” bill grew much closer to a reality on Tuesday as the Senate overcame a major hurdle and passed the legislation with the help of a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.
The star of the day was Lisa Murkowski, the centrist senator from Alaska, whose status as a potential holdout won her a night of direct lobbying from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republican leaders.
Murkowski, after casting her crucial vote for the bill, said she hoped the House would send it back to the Senate with changes, telling reporters that she wasn’t 100 percent behind it just yet: “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”
But House Speaker Mike Johnson is seemingly not playing ball. He announced Tuesday afternoon the House would take up the package this week as it stands, daring members with reservations to vote no. One provision that would have rolled back Medicaid expansion in states which expanded the program under Obamacare was pulled at the last minute, making it a slightly less bitter pill to swallow for moderates and members representing rural areas.
But Murkowski and others with lingering concerns about the legislation — from either her perspective or that of Congress’s deficit hawks — have no one but themselves to blame for where they are.
In every instance, Republicans on both wings of the GOP spectrum have threatened to vote against the bill, then backed down. Even now, members of the House may be preparing to do it one last time: the SALT caucus, a group of Republicans from blue states, is now facing down a scaled-back version of the SALT deduction hike after negotiations with the Senate fell through. Just last week members of the group were calling the proposal, now part of the reconciliation package, “unrealistic” — will they still fold? Probably.
Two of the deficit hawks, Thomas Massie in the House and Rand Paul in the Senate, found stronger courage to fuel their own opposition to the bill. But the rest, such as Murkowski and the moderates, have echoed the insistence that the chamber must pass the legislation in some form to avert what they argue is a worse outcome: the drop-off of the 2017 tax cuts.
Democrats argue there is, of course, a more obvious reason: Republicans, especially conservatives, are petrified of incurring President Donald Trump’s wrath. Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his “no” vote over the weekend, announced his retirement quickly afterwards.
Rep. Jim McGovern tore into his GOP counterparts on the Rules Committee in the House on Tuesday on the topic: “The sad fact is that many of you will fold in a nanosecond. You will vote for this even though you know it is bad for your own constituents. You are absolutely terrified the guy in the White House will get mad and try to find someone to run against you in a primary.”
“Truly I have never seen anything like this in my life, the kind of petrified fealty we see on the right. Scared by a man who called voting against the bill the ultimate betrayal.”
There is a chance that two members of the House Freedom Caucus will mount a rebellion over changes made to the bill by the Senate, which include a $50bn fund to keep rural hospitals afloat through changes to Medicaid. Their “no” votes would conceivably be enough to sink the legislation, which first passed the House by a one-vote margin.
Reps. Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, two fiscal conservatives in the House, threatened to slow up passage of the bill on Tuesday after the Senate’s vote. Roy told Politico the odds of passage by July 4 were “hell of a lot lower than they were even 48 hours ago”, given the Senate’s changes to the legislation. Axios reported that the number of House Republicans threatening to vote against the bill as of Tuesday afternoon was just under two dozen.
“I’m against this, because of what the Senate did. I’ll vote against it here, and I’ll vote against it on the floor until we get it right,” Norman vowed.
If they’re going to mount a stand, now would be the time. But Roy and Norman fell into line once before, much like Murkowski, after a similar landmark session in the House in May. It remains to be seen if they have the will to force Johnson to ping-pong the legislation back to the Senate again.
Roy may have shown his hand early.
In a post on X Monday evening, the congressman wrote of Trump, who publicly threatened to support a primary challenger against him in December: “We’ve got to deliver for the President.”
Make no mistake: Roy, despite the president personally insulting him (by describing him as having “no talent” in the same tweet) feels he owes political allegiance to Trump. In the end, that urge to “deliver for the president” is likely going to win out. There are more Republicans like him than not.
The odds of a “John McCain” moment are looking a “hell of a lot lower”, too.
