Before Speaker Mike Johnson could get his first real stretch of sleep in three days, the House GOP’s painstakingly drafted “big, beautiful bill” was running into resistance in the Senate.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski railed against the bill’s work requirements for Medicaid. Sen. Mike Rounds said the spectrum auction plan — championed by President Donald Trump — “has got to come out.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune did not embrace the New York House Republicans’ big tax deduction win.
And Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — who has been one of the Senate’s most vocal critics of the House’s Medicaid plans is eying another big change as well. He wants a more robust child tax credit than the $2,500 included in the House bill: “It needs to be higher.”
Then there’s the gang of Senate fiscal hawks vowing to cut far deeper to federal programs than even the hardliner House Freedom Caucus.
“Somebody’s got to be the dad that says, ‘I know y’all want to go to Disney World, but we can’t afford it.’ I guess I’m going to be that guy,” said GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, who dismissed House Republicans’ $1.5 trillion in spending cuts as too miniscule.
House GOP leaders just spent months mollifying dozens of holdouts from the hardliner and moderate camps to support a final bill, steering it through their slim margins. Now, it’s Thune’s turn. Thune and his leadership team will now begin the messy work of drafting a compromise bill that can pass their own staunchly divided conference, with few votes to lose.
And he’ll have to hope the House will accept it.
Thune’s math will be almost as complicated: Already, GOP Sen. Rand Paul has vowed to oppose the bill if it raises the debt limit — something Trump has demanded. And his more moderate senators, like Murkowski, are raising alarm bells at certain Medicaid provisions.
“We are going to write our own bill,” Thune told reporters Thursday, noting that the House gave them “a good product to work with.” Asked about the issue of Northeastern Republicans’ red line for costly tax breaks over the local levies they face, for instance, Thune said: “The House had to make a deal. But our members want to be heard on it and I assume we’ll have something to say.”
Like in the House, one of the biggest sticking points will involve Medicaid, the low-income health program that enrolls more than 71 million people. Republicans have been eager to rein in spending on the program since Democrats’ 2010 health care law dramatically increased federal spending on the program. But the Senate GOP, like in the House, is deeply divided about how far to go.
“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging, if not impossible, for us to implement,” Murkowski said of the House GOP’s plans to boot able-bodied adults off Medicaid if they don’t fulfill certain work requirements by December 2026.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, another potential Senate swing vote, said she is open to work requirements for able-bodied individuals as long as they are “carefully drafted.”
“I have said and made clear that I do not want to take away Medicaid benefits,” Collins said, adding that she will be closely reviewing the House GOP bill.
But other Senate Republicans suggested they will seek even bigger cuts to programs like Medicaid to pass the bill.
Sen. Kevin Cramer told CNN that he thinks the Senate will add “more spending cut opportunities” and a “little more aggressive approach” to reforms for programs like Medicaid. He singled out one policy — limiting states’ ability to levy taxes on health care providers, known as the Medicaid provider tax — that was too controversial to pass the House.
“At some point, we have to send the bill back to them and they’ll have a binary decision to make. And it will be, ‘Is a yes vote in passage better than if it doesn’t pass?’ I hope that’s the way they’ll look at it,” he said.
Senate hardliners ready to weigh in
As the House GOP delivered its bill across the Capitol, the hardline House Freedom Caucus warned their Senate counterparts not to water down their $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.
But some of the Senate’s own budget hawks were blunt that they didn’t think the House GOP’s changes went far enough.
“You had your chance. There’s some of these cuts that are not real, and we’re talking about over a decade, you know, if you do a trillion and a half, that’s like a percent and a half,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, the GOP budget chairman. “So, let’s don’t get higher on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending, because we didn’t.”
Johnson, the Wisconsin senator who often backchannels with the Freedom Caucus, made clear he plans to force his party into a bigger discussion on spending cuts. And he said there are four other Republicans who are on the same page with seeking those spending cuts — enough to scuttle the bill if they vote against it.
“I’ve been focusing on spending, spending, spending, spending. They were focusing on tax cuts, which, I mean, that’s fun to do, right? I mean, everybody loves tax cuts,” Johnson said.
Rounds told CNN that while the House has had the opportunity to make changes, “once the Senate weighs in on it, I think we’ll have a different opinion about what the bill looks like.” And Rounds has his own red line for the House bill — removing the House GOP’s policy to allow spectrum auction to help raise funds for the bill.
“We can negotiate about a lot of other things, except for spectrum, which has got to come out,” he said, adding that there are “a number of us that can’t” support the bill without that change.
“We’re a long ways from the finish line,” Rounds said of the coming weeks and months.
CNN’s Ted Barrett, Jenna Monnin and Casey Riddle contributed to this report.
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