Senate Republicans on Saturday grasped for the votes to pass their sprawling domestic policy package carrying President Trump’s agenda, after cutting a series of deals with holdouts in their ranks that they hoped would be enough to push it through the chamber in the coming days.
G.O.P. leaders were rushing to pass the legislation and send it to the House for final approval in time to meet the July 4 deadline Mr. Trump has set. But their aspirations for quick action over the weekend ran into trouble on Saturday, when a vote to open debate was delayed until the evening and then dragged into the night as some Republicans sought more concessions.
In a dramatic scene on the Senate floor, party leaders held open the test vote for more than three hours as they haggled with holdouts to secure their support. Vice President JD Vance was on hand to break a tie, but Republican leaders toiled to muster even a bare majority in support of moving forward with the bill.
Democrats have said they will insist on a line-by-line reading of the measure, a procedural protest that was expected to take more than a dozen hours and likely push any final action in the Senate into Monday at the earliest.
“Tonight’s going to be a long night, but this is going to be an even longer season for the American people,” Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, told reporters on Saturday evening. “Medicaid is going to receive an incredible gut punch.”
A 940-page version of the legislation that Republicans released in the wee hours of Saturday morning contained key changes aimed at winning over Republican skeptics. They included the creation of a $25 billion fund to help rural hospitals expected to be hit hard by the Medicaid cuts the legislation would impose, a faster phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar projects, and an increase in the cap on the state and local tax deduction demanded by lawmakers in the House.
There were also a number of parochial changes aimed at placating some of the most vocal Republican opponents of the legislation, including several for Alaska, home to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who has said the measure would hurt her state. That appeared to have won her support, though she waited more than 90 minutes after the vote began to cast her “aye,” after huddling in intense conversation with party leaders on the floor.
White House officials 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.” Mr. Trump spent part of his day golfing with Republican senators and meeting with holdouts.
Party leaders are trying to appease two flanks of their conference. Some, including Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they could not support it without greater reassurances that the Medicaid cuts it contains would not hurt rural hospitals in their states. And fiscal hawks, like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have said they do not want to back legislation that would only increase the deficit. Mr. Paul was among the president’s golfing partners on Saturday.
Even as the vote unfolded on Saturday night, a clutch of hard-right Republicans, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida, and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, were demanding that G.O.P. leaders insert even deeper spending cuts into the bill in exchange for their support.
“We need more deficit reduction,” Mr. Lee told reporters as he entered a meeting with Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader.
The legislation would extend tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017 and add some new ones President Trump campaigned on, while slashing spending on safety-net programs, including Medicaid and food assistance. The biggest tax cuts and the biggest changes to those anti-poverty programs remained intact. Taken together, the bill would most likely increase federal debt by more than $3 trillion over the next decade, though lawmakers were still waiting for an official estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.
Mr. Thune praised the tax cuts and boosts to security funding in the bill, exulting over what he called “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver legislation to create a safer, stronger and more prosperous America.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, denounced its cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and clean energy programs, calling it “cruel,” “un-American” and “radical.”
With Mr. Trump demanding quick action, Republicans in Congress have intensified their efforts to push it through to enactment even as many of them — including several who voted for it in the House — have been open about their reservations about a measure they are concerned could be a political loser.
The revisions released early Saturday were designed to allay some of those concerns.
Some Republican senators, including Mr. Tillis and Susan Collins of Maine, had pressed for the inclusion of a rural hospital fund to to help health care providers absorb the impact of a provision that would crack down on strategies that many states have developed to finance their Medicaid programs. Despite their pushback, that provider tax change remains in the bill, though lawmakers have delayed its implementation by one year.
It was unclear whether the $25 billion compensation fund added late in the process would be enough to win their votes. Ms. Collins had suggested that she wanted as much as $100 billion to ensure that rural hospitals, which operate on thin margins, were not adversely affected.
But it appeared to be enough to win over at least one Republican holdout who had expressed concern about the Medicaid cuts, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said he would vote for the bill despite his concerns about the impact of those reductions.
“We cannot be a working class party if you are taking away health care for working class people,” he said, denouncing the Medicaid changes in the bill as “bad.”
Mr. Tillis, on the other hand, who is up for re-election next year, told reporters at the Capitol on Saturday that he was still a “no” on the measure.
“It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities,” he said later in a statement. “This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population.”
Mr. Trump took to his social media platform late Saturday night to castigate Mr. Tillis for his vote, saying he was making a “BIG MISTAKE” and promising to recruit a primary challenger against him.
A new provision allowing “individuals in a noncontiguous state” to be exempt from enforcing new work requirements imposed on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, appeared aimed at mollifying Ms. Murkowski of Alaska. Her state would be hit with billions of dollars in nutrition assistance costs as a result of the legislation, and she had cited the provision as one of her chief concerns. The bill also includes new health provisions designed to benefit Alaska, as well as new tax benefits for fishermen in the state’s waters.
Some of the changes were aimed at appealing to members of the House, where Republicans from high-tax states like New York had threatened to sink the bill if it did not include a substantial increase in the state and local tax deduction, currently capped at $10,000. Senate Republicans were skeptical of the deduction but ultimately decided to match the House plan to lift the cap to $40,000. But while the House would make the increase permanent, the Senate would keep it for only five years, allowing it to snap back to $10,000 in 2030.
The newest draft would make even sharper cuts to subsidies for wind and solar power, something that Mr. Trump and other conservatives had explicitly called for this week. It remains to be seen whether those changes could cause friction with Republicans who have publicly supported green-energy credits, including Mr. Tillis, Ms. Murkowski and Senator John Curtis of Utah.
Previously, the Senate proposed allowing companies that were building wind and solar farms to claim a tax credit worth at least 30 percent of their costs if they started construction this year, with a phaseout over two years. But the revised bill would require companies to place their projects “in service” by the end of 2027 to claim the tax break.
The bill would also impose additional taxes on renewable energy projects that receive “material assistance” from China, even if they don’t qualify for the credit. Because China dominates global supply chains, those new fees could affect a large number of projects.
The new Senate measure would more quickly end tax credits for electric vehicles, doing away with them by Sept. 30. It would also slow the phaseout of a lucrative tax credit to make hydrogen fuels, allowing such projects to qualify if construction starts by the end of 2027, instead of by the end of this year.
Annie Karni and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
Margot Sanger-Katz is a reporter covering health care policy and public health for the Upshot section of The Times.
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