Members of the new Republican majority led by Senator John Thune have made it clear for months that they mean to shape the legislation to their liking.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Senate Republicans Say Changes Are Coming for Trump’s Domestic Policy Bill

Senate Republicans say changes are coming for the sprawling domestic policy bill carrying President Trump’s agenda. Their colleagues who took political risks to push it through the House might not like them.

by · NY Times

It took everything House Republicans could muster to just barely nudge their major domestic policy bill over the finish line by the sparest of margins at daybreak on Thursday.

Fresh off the triumph, they face a distinctly less appealing prospect: that the fragile deal they struck to pass it, which could carry substantial political risks for some of their most vulnerable members in next year’s midterm elections, is about to be dismantled by the Senate and replaced with something even less palatable.

Long before Speaker Mike Johnson’s herculean effort paid off with the House’s 215-to-214 approval of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Democrats had promised to make the measure — with its cuts to popular programs including Medicaid and food assistance — a central line of attack against the G.O.P.

And within hours afterward, Senate Republicans made clear that the debate within their party over the measure was far from over and that there would be significant changes in any measure they managed to send back to the House. Some of those could easily alienate House Republicans who already swallowed considerable reservations about the bill to vote “yes.”

If Democrats were brutal in their assessment of the House-passed legislation, some of the Senate Republican critics were unsparing, as well. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called the deficits produced by the House bill “completely unacceptable.”

“We didn’t establish the proper goal,” Mr. Johnson said. “The goal of the House was to pass ‘one big, beautiful bill.’ It is rhetoric. It is false advertising. The goal should have been to reduce average annual deficits.”

Mr. Johnson is just one of the conservative Senate fiscal hawks who would like a more serious focus on spending cuts in their version of the legislation, even though deeper cuts could scare off House Republicans facing difficult elections next year.

Other senators were more gentle, but said revisions were inevitable.

“We are going to have to figure out what the art of the possible is in the Senate,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who is facing re-election next year. “There’s clearly going to be changes to the bill.”

Besides the call for deeper cuts, some Republican senators are leery of the House push to phase out tax credits for big energy projects in their states. Some are waving their leadership off Medicaid cuts that would hit their constituents. Republican senators are much less interested than G.O.P. House members in securing greater state and local tax deductions for their voters since none of them represent New York, California, New Jersey and other high-tax blue states.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he simply would not vote for a measure that increases the federal debt limit, as the House bill would, to stave off a potentially calamitous federal default later this summer.

“I’m not voting to raise the debt ceiling $4 trillion to $5 trillion,” said Mr. Paul who also criticized the push for billions of dollars for new border security and fencing, arguing that the Trump administration had already successfully clamped down. “There’s nothing conservative about this, and I just can't be supportive.”

Imposing any or all of those changes in the Senate would upset the delicate compromise that Mr. Johnson, the speaker, painstakingly struck after days of tense negotiating with holdouts in dueling factions and pressure from the White House. The effort succeeded by the slimmest of margins, leading Mr. Johnson to urge the Senate to declare victory and pass the House bill unchanged — a request that had absolutely zero chance of being granted.

Senators are never of a mind to let the House take the lead, and this situation is no different. Members of the new Republican majority led by Senator John Thune of South Dakota have made it abundantly clear for months that they mean to shape the legislation to their liking.

Just how quickly they do so is an open question. Mr. Thune was not offering much information on Thursday in the way of a Senate timeline for acting.

“Yet to be determined,” he said.

Like the House, Senate Republicans have a relatively small majority, with three votes to spare. The need to keep at least 50 of them on board grants each senator significant leverage to have individual demands met. Another major complication is the stringent Senate rules that Republicans are using to avoid a filibuster and push the measure through over unified Democratic opposition, which strictly limit what can be included and narrow the space for negotiating any changes.

The myriad difficulties mean there is no guarantee that Senate Republicans can reach agreement among themselves, let alone with the House. Still, failure seems highly unlikely, with lawmakers in both chambers determined not to allow tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year to rise.

A collapse in the Senate would mean that House Republicans took an exceedingly tough vote for naught, a situation that has cost House members dearly in the past. In 2009, House Democrats took a risky vote on a major climate change bill that contributed to some incumbents losing their seats, only to watch as the Senate never even took it up.

Relegated to the sidelines in this Republican-only legislative debate, Senate Democrats are committed to putting whatever roadblocks they can in front of their colleagues to impede the legislation. But they also see the Republican legislative slog as providing ample fodder for their midterm campaign message as they push to win back the House and, less likely, the Senate in November 2026.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, suggested that Thursday would go down in history as the day Republicans lost the House, while Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, said the bill enhanced his party’s electoral prospects.

“Let me just say,” Mr. Schumer said at a news conference, “what the House just passed last night makes it significantly easier for us to take back the Senate.”

Following the House approval, Democrats and their political allies immediately unleashed a barrage of political attacks on the legislation and the vulnerable Republicans who supported it.

They accused G.O.P. lawmakers of a litany of transgressions, including tossing millions of Americans off Medicaid and snatching food away from deserving families to finance tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. They hit blue-state Republicans, among the most endangered House members, saying they caved too easily on getting their voters added tax relief, even though the G.O.P. lawmakers negotiated an increase in the allowable deduction, one that Senate Republicans already consider too generous.

Republicans fought back, saying it was Democrats who would pay a political price for uniformly opposing tax cuts, increased border security spending and more money for the Pentagon. They will have to work hard to pound that message in a midterm election, when it is typically members of the party in power who have to persuade voters to keep them around.

Now, after putting themselves on the line with the House vote, Republican House members must contend with Republican senators who regard the legislation they toiled to pass as an easy way out that was merely an opening bid.

“Someone has to be the dad who says, ‘I know everyone wants to go to Disney World, but we just can’t afford it,’” said Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator pushing for much deeper spending reductions. “I guess that is what is going to have to happen in the Senate.”

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