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Senate Republicans are inching closer to a final vote on President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” but face one more obstacle before lawmakers go on record on the president’s ambitious agenda.
Lawmakers wrapped up several hours of debate on the megabill that began Sunday afternoon and petered out early Sunday morning. The next hurdle is the marathon “vote-a-rama,” when lawmakers on either side of the aisle can submit an unlimited number of amendments to the bill.
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Senate Republicans will use the time to further change and mold the bill to sate holdouts, while Democrats will inflict as much pain, and burn as much time as possible, with amendments designed to kneecap or outright kill the legislation.
The debate was largely a predictably partisan affair filled with floor charts, impassioned gesticulating fists and pleas to either pass or nuke the bill.
Senate Democrats railed against the bill for its slew of changes to Medicaid, green energy tax subsidies and how the bill, particularly its design to make Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Job act permanent, would balloon the federal deficit.
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Republicans lauded the “big, beautiful bill” for the growth it could supercharge in the country, and in particular, how important it was to prevent the president’s first-term tax cuts from lapsing.
“I say to everybody in America who’s been hearing all of the politics of fear, about what we’re doing here and running up the deficit, [they] need to remember that only in Washington D.C. is the refusal to raise your taxes an increase in the deficit,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said. “And we’re not going to let that happen.”
Lawmakers kicked off the debate with a back and forth on whether Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., or the Senate parliamentarian had the authority to dictate if Republicans could use the current policy baseline, the budget gimmick the GOP argues would negate their tax bill from ballooning the deficit, or current law, which would show the real cost of Trump’s tax package over the next decade.
“Republicans can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want to try and make the math work on paper, but you can’t paper over the real-life consequences of adding tens of trillions to the debt,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released two sets of scores Saturday and Sunday that reflected both current policy and current law. Under current policy, the bill would tack on just over $507 billion over the next decade. But under current law, the package would add roughly $3.3 trillion.
Graham countered that as budget chair, he has the right to set the numbers.
“The resolution we’re operating under to get us here, we voted to make that the case so we’re not doing anything sneaky,” he said. “We actually voted to give me the authority to do this, and it passed.”
Graham also went to bat for the GOP’s planned cuts to Medicaid, which they have presented as efforts to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the program by instilling work requirements, booting illegal migrants off the benefit rolls, and making changes to just how much the federal government would pay states.
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He argued that since former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act became law, Medicaid has grown exponentially, largely because Obama “incentivized” states to opt in to the Medicaid expansion program and allowed for able-bodied working-age adults to get onto the benefit rolls, something he noted that Medicaid was “never intended” to do.
“It’s a good thing for the individual involved to be working,” he said. “It’s a good thing for the taxpayer, for them to be working. But that seems to be a crime on the other side, to ask somebody to work that can work.”
Not all Republicans were aligned in their passion to pass Trump’s bill.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., torched the legislative behemoth in a fiery floor speech that railed against the deficit-adding effect the bill would have. He and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., both voted against advancing the bill through a key procedural hurdle late Saturday night.
Tillis, who largely agrees with many of the tweaks to Medicaid, railed against the changes to the provider tax rate and accused the president of being duped by his health care advisors in the White House.
He said that he would remain against the bill until lawmakers took the time to actually unpack what their Medicaid proposals would do to the states, and questioned “what’s wrong with actually understanding what this bill does?”
“Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise,” he warned. “What do I tell 663,000 people in 2 or 3 years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding isn’t there anymore.”
Paul, who has taken issue with the addition of a $5 trillion hike to the debt ceiling baked into the bill, reaffirmed that he would be voting against the megabill during final passage.
“In deciding whether to vote for the ‘big, not-so-beautiful bill,’ I’ve asked a very specific question: Will the deficit be more or less next year? The answer, without question, is this bill will grow the deficit,” he said.
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