Senate Republicans on Monday beat back multiple Democratic attempts to derail their sweeping tax cut and domestic policy bill, as they continued to hunt for the votes to pass President Trump’s first-year legislative agenda.
On a marathon day of voting on proposed changes to the legislation, Republicans held firm against Democratic attacks on the measure’s cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition programs as well as an accounting gimmick the G.O.P. employed to mask the true impact of the bill on the deficit.
Republicans said they were imposing changes to Medicaid that would make the program more sustainable, though nonpartisan analyses showed more than 11 million people could lose coverage.
“The whole issue of what we’re doing with the Medicaid program is to get rid of the waste, fraud and abuse, make it work in the way in which it was intended, to cover the people for whom it was intended,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader.
Democrats expected to lose most of their attempts to change the legislation and send it back to the drawing board, but still wanted to put Republicans on record on a host of issues in the legislation.
“Republicans have said that they don’t want to cut Medicaid,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said at the start of the voting. “Today, we’ll give you the chance.”
The bigger challenge for Republicans was in unifying their own party behind the bill, which polls have shown is deeply unpopular. At least two senators in their ranks, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have said they will not vote for the measure. With Democrats uniformly opposed, G.O.P. leaders could afford to lose only three Republican votes in the closely divided Senate. And even then, they would need to call in Vice President JD Vance to cast a tiebreaking vote.
Four defectors would be enough to kill the bill. But at least a half-dozen Republican senators were still undecided, and several issues that could make or break their decisions had not been resolved and were expected to come to a vote on Monday afternoon.
Even if Senate Republicans manage to squeeze the bill through their chamber, its fate was uncertain in the other chamber of Congress. Hard-right conservatives in the House have raised the alarm about the deficit impact, and others have objected to the Medicaid cuts in the Senate measure, which are deeper than those approved last month by the House.
The vote-a-thon followed a weekend session marked by sharp partisan conflict. Senate Republicans now hope to approve the measure and send it to the House. It would extend roughly $3.8 trillion in tax cuts enacted in 2017 and partially pays for them by slashing spending on safety net programs.
The legislation, which is being considered under special budgetary rules that protect it from a filibuster, would also make significant investments in border security and the military — top priorities of congressional Republicans and the White House.
“We’re going to put in place border security measures that keep it secure,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the Budget Committee chairman, said in extolling the measure. “We are going to make the tax cuts permanent so your taxes do not go up in December.”
But the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid as well as reductions in federal nutrition programs that would offset the cost of continuing the tax reductions have drawn fierce opposition from Democrats and made several Republicans uneasy.
One of the Republican opponents, Mr. Tillis, announced on Sunday that he would not seek re-election next year after he came under harsh attack by Mr. Trump for his opposition to the bill. Mr. Tillis said he judged it would be too harmful to North Carolina’s health care system for him to back. He took to the floor late Sunday to assail the measure and Mr. Trump, warning that his party was “about to make a mistake” in slashing Medicaid and betraying the president’s promise to protect it.
The other known G.O.P. opponent, Mr. Paul, scoffed at claims by fellow Republicans that the plan would not add significantly to the federal debt, noting that it includes a $5 trillion increase in the federal debt limit.
“That is an admission that they know they are not controlling the deficit,” Mr. Paul said.
Other Republicans were still holding out. Senators were still waiting to see if the parliamentarian would allow a spate of measures aimed at winning the vote of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to be part of the bill, including a provision that would exempt her state from having to pay for a share of nutrition assistance payments currently financed entirely by the federal government.
And a clutch of conservatives, including Senators Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, have demanded a vote on an amendment that would slash Medicaid further, by changing the formula used to determine what share of the program’s bills are paid by the federal government.
Mr. Johnson has said he will wait to see whether Republicans adopt that amendment before deciding whether he will support the overall legislation. Should the proposal succeed, the bill could lose the support of senators who are already alarmed at the level of Medicaid cuts it would impose, as well as Republicans in the House with districts with large populations of Medicaid beneficiaries.
Republicans accused Democrats of misrepresenting the legislation, which they described as economic stimulus that would prevent a tax increase from hitting a large swath of Americans. They argued that the Medicaid reductions would return the program to its original purpose of helping poor families and knock able-bodied adults who could work off the rolls.
They also noted that besides extending the tax cuts from 2017, the legislation would provide new tax breaks such as working-class deductions for tips and overtime plus an expanded child tax credit, a larger standard deduction for some older Americans and one for buyers of new cars made in the United States.
“If the Trump tax cuts expire, taxpayers in all income groups would face massive tax hikes and the majority of the burden — $2.6 trillion — would fall on taxpayers making less than $400,000 per year,” said Senator Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Finance Committee. “This legislation prevents that outcome and delivers more than $600 billion of new tax relief specifically targeted to benefit low- and middle-income families and workers.”
As debate opened on Sunday, Democrats harshly criticized Republicans for employing a budget maneuver they said violated Senate rules and hid the true impact of the bill’s tax cuts on the federal debt. Republicans unilaterally asserted that the tax cuts would not add to federal deficits since they were already in place, a break with past congressional accounting practices for tax cuts that were set to expire.
“It is fakery,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee. “The budget numbers are a fraud, but the deficits will be very real. The prospect of a catastrophic debt spiral is very real.”
Margot Sanger-Katz contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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