President Donald Trump faces a math problem in trying to get his massive budget bill through the U.S. Senate, according to a new analysis.
House Republicans passed their version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on a party-line vote early Thursday, and now Senate majority leader John Thune must navigate some tricky hurdles and tamp down intra-party clashes to get a final version of the bill onto the president's desk, according to MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown.
"Thanks to the budget reconciliation process, that set of hurdles does not include the filibuster," Brown wrote. "A simple majority vote is enough, and because Republicans control 53 Senate seats, Thune can lose three Republicans’ support and still pass the bill with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. Theoretically, Thune could call up the legislation immediately and pass it without a single Democratic vote. However, Senate Republicans say there’s work to be done before they can sign off on the bill."
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GOP senators are already promising changes to the House bill, and some of their demands are at odds with changes sought by other Republicans, such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) insisting that Medicaid benefits remain untouched and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) making clear that clean energy tax credits remain in place.
"The bill House Republicans passed Thursday does both of those things — and on a quicker timeline than previous versions of the legislation," Brown wrote. "House GOP leadership agreed to those changes to win over conservative holdouts who’d demanded deeper spending cuts over budgetary trickery that front-loaded tax cuts while spending cuts were put off for later. It’s conceivable that some Republicans would support amendments from their Democratic colleagues to blunt the impact of those most recent shifts."
Some hardline conservatives in the Senate – such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) – don't believe the House bill went far enough to offset the extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, and Thune has said his conference will likely write its own bill to ensure smooth passage – but Brown said Republicans may not be able to get the package to the president before their promised deadline of July 4.
"It’s not an impossible task, as the last-minute push to get the bill through the House despite the odds against it showed," Brown wrote. "The urgency that comes from needing to raise the debt ceiling before the summer ends will also certainly light a fire under the normally plodding Senate. But the number of differences that need to be resolved on both sides of the Capitol still makes it hard to see precisely how the math winds up mathing in favor of getting Trump’s agenda finalized in the next seven weeks."
