Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) expects to start voting Friday on President Donald J. Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.” This would have Senators voting into the weekend and next week, and it would upend the House’s recess next week, but Leader Thune is confident Congress will meet its self-imposed July 4th deadline to get a bill on President Trump’s desk in spite of being under immense pressure to water down the Medicaid provisions the Senate GOP is counting on for hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of savings. With just two days until Senate GOP leaders want to start voting, they have been hit with a mathematical mess: Tax writers are proposing a package that’s hundreds of billions of dollars more costly than what House Republicans have proposed, while senators struggle to finalize a larger package of spending cuts to offset it. That mismatch was underscored by a new nonpartisan analysis released Monday night from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which found that the Senate’s tax package would cost some $400 billion more than the House’s in an apples-to-apples comparison. That figure reflects pet priorities for Thune, Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and other Senate Republicans who want to make sure costly business tax incentives are made permanent. Notably, the JCT figure does not reflect a House-brokered deal on the state-and-local-tax deduction — something that is crucial to a handful of blue-state Republicans but is otherwise disposable as far as the Senate GOP is concerned. Adding in the SALT language from the House-passed bill — which a handful of GOP lawmakers are insisting on — would add at least another $350 billion to the cost of the bill.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is warning in private that Senate Republicans could well cost House Republicans their majority next year if they try to push through the deep Medicaid cuts in the current Senate version. The other drama hanging over the bill are several imminent, critical rulings from Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. Several committees that already have rulings in hand are due to release revised text as soon as today, and Republicans could know as soon as today whether MacDonough will clear major parts of their tax package. As of late Tuesday, the parliamentarian had not yet ruled on provisions linked to the so-called current policy baseline, an accounting maneuver that zeroes out the costs of $3.8 trillion of expiring tax cuts.
For today, the Senate is expected to take up Confirmation of Executive Calendar #140, Paul Dabbar, of New York, to be Deputy Secretary of Commerce and a Motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar #93, Kenneth Kies, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
The House will take up H.R. 3944 – Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026 as well as one postponed Suspension: H. Res. 519 – Condemning the attacks on Minnesota lawmakers in Brooklyn Park and Champlin, Minnesota, and calling for unity and the rejection of political violence in Minnesota and across the United States, as amended.
