The Senate has spent all day slowly trudging through an hours-long vote-a-thon, a series of votes on Senate parliamentarian rulings and amendments to this year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that GOP leaders are hoping can advance to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4. Senate Republicans are hoping to pass the bill sometime late this evening or early Tuesday morning following debate and amendment votes.
As of this afternoon, it remained unclear whether Senate GOP leaders had the votes to pass the bill, though Republicans are optimistic the legislation will clear the upper chamber eventually. Failing to advance the bill to Trump’s desk would be a catastrophic political failure for congressional GOP leaders, especially considering the legislation is widely considered to be the signature domestic policy achievement of the president’s second term. In addition to extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the legislation includes provisions that would increase defense and border security funding, make modest changes to Medicaid, and create a series of new tax breaks favored by the president, including temporary tax exemptions for overtime pay and tips.
Considering Vice President JD Vance can break a tie, the Senate GOP’s 53-seat majority means Senate Majority Leader John Thune can only afford four defections to pass the bill. A handful of senators have not yet said how they plan to vote, but only two Senate Republicans joined Democrats over the weekend in trying block the bill from advancing to a formal vote: libertarian-leaning Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is opposing the bill over its cost-cutting and debt-ceiling provisions, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who announced his retirement over the weekend hours after Trump publicly threatened to support a Republican primary challenger against him in 2026. The bill cleared the procedural hurdle by a 51-49 vote.
Tillis dug in his heels against the bill’s modest Medicaid reforms and urged the president to reconsider his support for provisions that he says will strip far too many people from getting coverage they need. “The people in the White House advising the president, they’re not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise,” Tillis said on the Senate floor Sunday evening. “I’m telling the president, you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.”
Democrats have spent months characterizing the legislation as a legislative strategy to cut Medicaid for the needy to offset big tax breaks for Republicans’ billionaire friends. Some GOP senators are nervous about the bill’s phaseout timelines for clean-energy tax credits, while others are worried about changes to food-assistance programs and the bill’s overall price tag.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a new estimate over the weekend forecasting the Senate version’s cost at $3.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade. The CBO analysis according to the Republican-requested current policy baseline would save $507.6 billion over the next decade – a controversial GOP scoring method which holds that extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts will cost nothing. Republicans did not discuss the issue directly with the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, whom Senate GOP leaders have pledged not to overrule.
Democrats say this current policy baseline accounting method is a sham. “It is fakery,” Senator Ron Wydon (D., Ore.) said on the Senate floor. “The budget numbers are a fraud, but the deficits will be very real.”
Complicating matters further, the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that some of the bills do not clear the Byrd rule that senators use to navigate reconciliation, a budget process that allows lawmakers to circumvent the chamber’s 60-vote threshold and pass legislation with a simple majority instead. While some provisions are still under review, the legislative language the parliamentarian has singled out as noncompliant include provisions that ban Medicaid and Medicaid coverage of gender-transition care for minors and adults and create more frequent eligibility checks for Medicaid beneficiaries, among others.
The parliamentarian reportedly reversed on Monday afternoon her initial assessment that a legislative provision exempting certain orphan drugs from Medicare price negotiation requirements violates the Byrd rule, meaning the original legislative language can stay in the bill.
Even if the bill clears the Senate in the next 24 hours, finding compromise in the House will be a tricky balancing act. House Republican moderates are worried about major changes to Medicaid in the Senate-drafted version, as well as an amendment drafted by Senator Rick Scott (R., Fla.) and championed by other Senate GOP fiscal hawks that would phase-out Medicaid’s 90 percent cost-sharing for new non-disabled beneficiaries without children by 2030. That provision would save an estimated $3.3 trillion through 2034 if it makes it into the bill.
On the House side, the fiscally conservative House Freedom Caucus released a statement Monday afternoon decrying the Senate-drafted bill’s price tag. The group called on Republicans in the upper chamber “to make major changes” to make the final bill “in the ballpark of compliance with the agreed upon House budget framework.”
“The House budget framework was clear: no new deficit spending in the One Big Beautiful Bill,” the statement read. “The Senate’s version adds $651 billion to the deficit — and that’s before interest costs, which nearly double the total. That’s not fiscal responsibility.”