‘Nothing is easy around here, and that one was particularly challenging, but it was a good outcome,’ said Thune of the mega-bill.
B ack in March, Senate Majority Leader John Thune distilled the stakes of the reconciliation fight in simple terms. “We have to deliver,” he told National Review at the time. “And shame on us if we don’t.”
Roughly four months later, Thune and his Senate Republican leadership colleagues can finally pat themselves on the back for successfully muscling the president’s mammoth tax-and-spend bill across the finish line before the July 4 recess — well before many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act were set to expire in December.
“Nothing is easy around here, and that one was particularly challenging, but it was a good outcome,” he told National Review last week in his first lengthy sit-down interview since the bill passed.
Congressional Republicans’ latest legislative victory is a huge boon to Thune in his first year as Senate GOP leader, who is now going two-for-two after also successfully confirming the president’s cabinet earlier this year. On the docket next: passing the White House’s rescissions package and Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill, and kickstarting the federal-judge confirmation process.
“We’ll confirm this Sixth Circuit Judge on Monday,” Thune said. “This is the first one, and there are 50 vacancies total on the court. When we came in in 2017 there were 100, so there aren’t as many, but they’re obviously a huge priority,” he continued, emphasizing that stacking the federal bench with conservative judges was one of the greatest legacies of Trump’s first term and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s record-long tenure.
Does Thune expect another reconciliation bill in the next fiscal year? “Could be. We’ll see,” he said. He namechecked Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), who wants to take another legislative package focused on “trying to find additional areas of savings that we can reduce, again, the overall size and scope of government, and try and do something meaningful to get the debt under control,” Thune explained.
“And then if we have other ideas on taxes, if there are other things that are eligible for reconciliation that our members in the House want to do and the president is interested in doing, yeah, I could see it,” he continued.
For now, he’s still celebrating his monumental success in passing the first bill, which is expected to be the main legislative achievement of President Trump’s second term. Success was not guaranteed.
From the start, Thune and House Republican leaders staunchly disagreed over whether to pass the president’s agenda in one legislative package or two. Negotiations over the bill’s Medicaid, food assistance, and spending-cut provisions were so fraught that congressional Republicans grew increasingly worried about whether they’d face a repeat of 2017, when the GOP’s monthslong effort to repeal Obamacare at the start of Trump’s first term went up in flames. Complicating matters further, the Senate parliamentarian rulings required lots of rewrites in the final days.
The process culminated in a more than 26-hour-long vote-a-thon on the Senate floor.
“We finally got on the vote-a-rama trying to assess where that 50th vote was going to come from,” Thune said. With Republican Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in the “no” and “undecided” category, Senate Republican leaders launched a whip operation and search for a swing vote they could flip.
They settled on Murkowski and drafted a suite of legislative sweeteners to win her over, including food assistance work-requirement exemptions, billions in funding for rural hospitals, and more generous tax credits for Alaskan whaling captains. “We were working the Alaska issues hard,” he acknowledged. “We were working it right up to the very end, and it turned out that, fortunately, Senator Murkowski found her way to vote for the bill.”
Vance cast the tie-breaking vote, sending the bill back to the lower chamber and essentially daring fiscal hawks and Medicaid moderates frustrated by the Senate-drafted legislative language to torpedo the president’s agenda the day ahead of the July 4 recess. The strategy worked.
Thune and his Senate Finance Committee colleagues succeeded in working in a raft of business tax wins, such as full expensing for bonus depreciation, interest deductibility, research and development, and permanence for the 2017 tax cuts.
“If you’re interested in deficit reduction, which a lot of our folks were, the way to get that is to get higher growth, faster growth, in an expanding economy, and that generates more tax revenue,” Thune said. Getting the president on board with 2017 tax cut permanence and full expensing required lots of behind the scenes maneuvering on the part of Senate Republicans, Thune said. “Eventually, I think the White House came around to the view that many of us held.”
In Thune’s view, the future for conservative tax reform is creating a more streamlined tax code. “I’m also about broadening the base, lowering rates, and just getting the complexity and the bureaucracy and the red tape out of the tax code, and making it as simple as possible. That, to me, also ought to be one of the goals. And this time around, we probably didn’t get enough of that done.”
Coming Challenges
Looking back at the reconciliation bill, there are still lingering disappointments from fiscal hawks like Senator Johnson, who supported the bill but remain frustrated by what he felt was a rushed process on many of the bill’s tax-and-spend provisions.
From the start of the reconciliation process, there was an understanding among congressional Republicans that the bill needed to include the president’s 2024 campaign promises to exempt tips and overtime from taxes, which the legislation does temporarily.
“We all felt pretty much: He ran on those, he got elected on those, it’s something I don’t think we’re going to really deny him. I always talked about no tax on cash tips — don’t include credit card. That modification wasn’t made,” the Wisconsin senator said. “There were a lot of other small, little tax credits effort throughout the thing. I would just like to have taken the next couple weeks here to go through that and have these discussions that didn’t happen.”
“So, I wasn’t happy about that at all,” he told NR. Despite his public complaints about the bill’s price tag, he told reporters that he voted yes on the mammoth legislative packages in part because he received assurances from Senate Republicans and the White House that the party will trudge ahead with a second reconciliation bill. “I gained a fair amount of confidence from the White House, the president, our leadership that we will have a second bite at the apple,” he told reporters recently.
It’s possible that lingering frustrations among fiscal hawks may metastasize into a harder political problem for Senate GOP leaders to manage over time.
Thune and Senate GOP leaders may also face a new political challenge in someone like Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina senator who announced late last month he would not seek a third term in 2026 one day after the president threatened to recruit a primary challenger for his opposition to the reconciliation bill over its Medicaid reforms.
Speaking with National Review last week, Tillis said that in the last hours before the final reconciliation vote, he spoke more with the White House about his disagreements with the bill than he did with Thune.
“He’s taken on a new role after a long-term leader, and I think he’s settling into the role,” Tillis said of the South Dakotan Senate GOP leader while also hinting that in his view, Senate Republicans should leverage their power more. “The key there is that on the one hand, we want to support the party in the White House,” he said, and “on the other hand, we have to have independence, too.”
Beyond the perennial difficulties that come with managing a 53-member conference, Thune and Senate GOP leaders will soon face new challenges on the electoral front. And after retaking the majority during a strong 2024 election season, Senate Republicans will have a trickier map in the 2026 midterms.
Republicans will work hard this cycle to flip first-term Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff’s seat in Georgia and retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters’s open seat in Michigan. But they will also need to protect centrist Senator Susan Collins in Maine and retiring Senator Thom Tillis’s seat in North Carolina, as well as avoid damaging primaries in Texas and Louisiana, where Senators John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy are facing Republican challengers.
The Thune-aligned Senate Leadership Fund already raked in $85 million in the first half of the off-year year — a strong fundraising figure that will come in handy for what’s expected to be an expensive cycle.
“We should do well, but we’re probably going to be looking at least a handful of primaries,” Thune told NR.