House GOP support for President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has derailed even further as the Senate version moves closer to a vote.
House Republicans from both sides of the conference have expressed their frustration with the Senate’s changes to their version of the bill, which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) celebrated as a massive victory upon its passage in May after months of back and forth.
“Well, it’s not particularly great,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner.
“If I’m a senator right now, I’m going to [Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD)] and I’m saying, ‘Didn’t you cut a deal with the House guys when they voted the budget out that you were going to honor?’” Roy continued.
The Senate parliamentarian must review the bill line by line to remove provisions that are extraneous to the budget process through what’s known as the Byrd Rule. Although the parliamentarian stripped some provisions Thursday morning, many key GOP provisions remained in the legislation, such as work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients and various measures related to program integrity.
The GOP “no” votes are racking up in the House after the Senate made changes and the parliamentarian threw out many provisions related to Medicaid that had been designed to offset the cost of making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. Over 20 House Republicans are unhappy with where the bill is in the Senate, after warning against any major changes.
Fiscal hawks hoped to improve the bill by making more cuts to spending through Medicaid and green energy tax credits that were part of former President Joe Biden’s 2021 Inflation Reduction Act. Fiscal hawks in the House are looking for a more aggressive phase-out of those green energy credits, whereas the Senate is opting to wind them down more slowly.
“The Senate provisions are way far off what we see at the House,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “Many of us had hoped the bill would get better; it seems to have gone the other direction, and so there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), an original holdout during negotiations over the bill in the House, told the Washington Examiner he is a “no” if the Senate bill comes back with the current changes.
“What I hear is not good, but now I’m encouraged, because we got some senators that are gonna stick tight until we get to prove it,” Norman said.
Medicaid has also been a sore spot for Republicans in the House and Senate. The upper chamber has lowered the provider tax, which the states use to help fund Medicaid, from 6% to 3.5%, whereas the House bill simply froze it. The parliamentarian slashed this provision from the Senate bill, but GOP leaders are reworking the language to preserve it.
“I’m letting the dust settle here, so then we can analyze and look at where things fall and what it actually is going to look like,” Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) told the Washington Examiner.
Additionally, the situation with the state and local tax deduction has not yet shaken out.
What to do with the cap on SALT deductions has become one of the most politically fraught issues during reconciliation. A group of House Republicans from high-tax blue states, such as New York and California, has used the party’s slim margin in the House to force leadership’s hand on a larger SALT cap.
The so-called “SALT caucus” quadrupled the $10,000 cap on SALT, which was initially imposed by Republicans in 2017. Senate Republicans wanted to negotiate the cap down in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the SALT caucus has remained firm in keeping a $40,000 cap in the bill and has threatened to vote against the entire bill if the SALT cap is dialed back in the Senate.
“I really doubt it will be adjusted much if they want this bill to become law,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Washington Examiner this week.
Notably, unlike the House, which has several SALT caucus members, there are no analogous lawmakers in the Senate. Most in the Senate GOP conference would not want to see the cap raised at all, or would like to see it lowered. They argue that SALT deductions primarily benefit high-income earners in blue states and subsidize spending by state and local governments led by Democrats.
As of Thursday, a deal on SALT still hadn’t been reached between the SALT Republicans and Senate negotiators. The $40,000 cap negotiated on the House side appears likely to remain, but Senate negotiators are toying with lowering the $500,000 income threshold that was part of the deal. The question is whether SALT lawmakers are willing to budge on that, and if so, by how much.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) said Thursday afternoon that the SALT caucus had rejected an offer earlier that day.
“Obviously, there’s a strong disagreement on the number, and we’re continuing to dialogue with them,” he said.
Republicans passed the legislation in the lower chamber through reconciliation, a legislative process that allows bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate. The bill carries many components needed to unlock much of Trump’s agenda. It now sits in the Senate, where it will undergo changes before the upper chamber passes it to be sent back to the House for final passage.
The House-passed bill was the product of months of negotiations between various factions within the GOP caucus, who jockeyed for sometimes contradictory concessions. The razor-thin House majority gave these factions outsize bargaining power, as they could withhold votes in exchange for legislative changes because Johnson does not have enough members to offset more than a few holdouts.
The speaker worked as a mediator between the groups, huddling with the warring factions multiple times since Trump took office. Johnson will continue being the mediator to get this bill across the finish line following the Senate’s passage of its version of the bill, which is still expected in the coming days.
Final passage is running against the president’s ambitious timeline of passing the legislation by the Fourth of July, a self-imposed deadline that irritated many GOP fiscal hawks who accused leadership of jamming the major package through.
The parliamentarian’s ruling against provisions in the Senate Finance Committee’s portion of the bill, including cuts to healthcare provider taxes, federal Medicaid reimbursements, and immigrant eligibility for Medicaid, has also complicated the path forward.
As some of the GOP fires back following the parliamentarian’s rulings this week, Thune is standing firm on Senate procedure just days before the Senate is expected to hold a vote on its version of the bill.
It would be a mistake to overrule Elizabeth MacDonough, Thune told reporters on Thursday after she struck the Medicaid reforms in the megabill despite members from both chambers expressing their disapproval of the process.
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“It is time for our elected leaders to take back control,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) wrote on X. “@JDVance should overrule the Parliamentarian and let the will of the people, not some staffer hiding behind Senate procedure, determine the future of this country.”
The GOP is not the only party that has called for overruling the parliamentarian when provisions were stripped from key legislation.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) shared a similar frustration to Steube’s when former President Joe Biden’s reconciliation package underwent the same process four years ago. The Senate parliamentarian cut out a number of measures from the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, including one that would have raised the minimum wage and others related to immigration reform.
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“Abolish the filibuster,” Omar wrote on X in 2021. “Replace the parliamentarian. What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.”
Getting rid of the parliamentarian would eliminate a significant check on the reconciliation process for both parties.