The Senate narrowly voted to begin debating President Donald Trump’s domestic policy package late Saturday night as intra-party negotiations continue.
All but two Republican senators—Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted to advance the bill, which is poised to gut Medicaid and earmarks some $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, among other things. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, originally voted no but switched his vote at the last minute, meaning that Vice President JD Vance, who was standing by, did not need to break a tie.
Time is running out, however, as Trump has demanded to sign the bill on the Fourth of July. Saturday’s vote allows the Senate to begin debating Trump’s bill, teeing up a final passage vote in that chamber as soon as Monday. Still, the measure must go back to the House if it passes the Senate.
In a Truth Social post just after Midnight, Trump said he was “VERY PROUD OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.” Republicans crossing this procedural line in the Senate comes after several days of bargaining about what would make it into the text of what Trump has referred to as his “great, big, beautiful bill.”
The Senate bill, in part, raises the nation’s debt limit by $5 trillion, expands requirements and shifts the funding structure for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts which are set to expire at the end of the year, introduces new tax deductions for tipped and overtime work, scraps several existing student loan repayment options and replaces them with new ones, and threatens funding for increased broadband access for states that impose regulations on AI in the next 10 years.
For Tillis, the Medicaid changes in the bill led him to withhold his support.
The bill, he said in a statement, “would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”
“This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population,” he continued, “and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population.”
After Tillis expressed his concern about the bill, the president, who spent part of his day golfing with Republican Senators and meeting with holdouts, said he would explore backing a primary challenger to the two-term Senator, writing on Truth Social that he was making a “big mistake.”
On Sunday, Tillis announced he wouldn’t run for reelection.
“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” Tillis wrote in a statement condemning “hypocrisy in American politics.”
“After they get elected, they don’t bother to do the hard work to research the policies they seek to implement and understand the consequences those policies could have on that young adult living in a trailer park, struggling to make ends meet,” he continued, referring to his upbringing.
As The New York Times reported on Saturday, the White House had “ratcheted up pressure on Republicans to fall in line behind the measure, issuing an official policy statement saying that failure to do so by Independence Day ‘would be the ultimate betrayal.’”
Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, architect of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Trump confidant, also bemoaned the bill on his social media site, X, on Saturday.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote above a post about how the bill’s current iteration would cut incentives and increase hurdles for those heading up wind and solar energy projects. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told fellow Democrats on Saturday that, if the Senate voted to debate the bill, the party would force clerks to read the entirety of the 940-page bill out loud. The move is a way to give Democrats more time to fight the bill, and raise awareness of its contents. In 2021, when Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, had clerks read the 628-page Democrat bill, the American Rescue Act, it took 10 hours and 44 minutes.
As of midday Sunday, the bill is still being read.
“Senate Republicans are scrambling to pass a radical bill, released to the public in the dead of night, praying the American people don’t realize what’s in it,” Schumer said of the decision. “If Senate Republicans won’t tell the American people what’s in this bill, then Democrats are going to force this chamber to read it from start to finish.”
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