The Senate is beginning a grueling, hours-long process to amend and debate Trump's "big, beautiful bill" that guts Medicaid and clean energy subsidies while extending tax cuts for the super-rich and beefing up border funding. But once it's done, it all goes back to the House — where the far-right Freedom Caucus whose reluctant support helped the original version pass is enraged at how the bill is shaping up.
According to Punchbowl News on Monday, the principal issue is that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) promised the Freedom Caucus if they backed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, the Senate would find $2 trillion in spending cuts to offset it — but as it stands now, the bill doesn't do that.
"The House Freedom Caucus previewed on Sunday what we believe will be their chief argument against the measure, saying that the Senate bill 'adds $1.3 trillion to the deficit,' which is 1,705% more than the House bill," said the report. This means the Freedom Caucus "is almost certain to demand a bunch of changes to the Senate’s reconciliation package – changes that Johnson will desperately want to avoid."
The face of the discontent is Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who is furious that the bill doesn't phase out the Inflation Reduction Act's green energy subsidies as fast as he wanted, saying it keeps “in place about half of the subsidies.”
Compounding all these issues, a handful of vulnerable swing-district Republicans voted for the House version of the bill despite being uncomfortable with the roughly $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and the Senate version adds even more cuts, potentially jeopardizing those votes as well.
White House officials are currently projecting confidence that they can smooth over all these issues once the bill gets through the Senate. However, the issue is that many in the Freedom Caucus "reluctantly voted to advance the reconciliation bill from the House last month with the misplaced hope that the Senate would accede to the hard right’s demands."
Johnson, with a razor-thin majority, can only afford to lose a handful of votes in the House. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), David Valadao (R-CA), and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) are all opposed, with several other GOP lawmakers leaning against as well for various reasons.
