Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has a closing message for the Republicans still opposing the upper chamber’s tax bill: “Not everybody’s going to get what they want.”

At Tuesday’s conference lunch, Thune told Republicans to set aside their misgivings over the bill with time running short to meet a self-imposed July 4 deadline. He is facing fierce blowback to a proposed cap on the tax states use to fund Medicaid, while fiscal hawks are still dug in over their demands for more fiscal austerity.

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“I just think when push comes to shove, you’re looking at whether you’re going to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Thune later told reporters at his weekly press conference.

Those concerns boiled over at Tuesday’s lunch when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is up for reelection in 2026, warned colleagues that the provider tax is “unworkable” in his home state, going so far as to compare it to the botched Obamacare rollout that harmed Democrats in subsequent elections.

Meanwhile, Thune faced a volley of complaints in the House, where both fiscal conservatives and centrist Republicans threatened to vote against the Senate bill in a series of competing letters and statements.

The House is preparing to take up the Senate’s legislation quickly if Thune can pass it through his chamber by the end of the week.

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Thune has taken steps to accommodate those concerns, working with Senate tax writers on language that would protect rural hospitals from closures due to the provider cap. Separately, he has deputized Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) to reach an agreement with the SALT Caucus over the state and local tax deduction.

But Thune has also shown a willingness to tune out the complaints, telling the Washington Examiner that he was comfortable with the current provider tax language despite 16 House centrists penning a Tuesday letter to lobby for the lower chamber’s more modest language.

“We like where we are,” Thune said. “I think we’re in a good spot.”

His attitude reflects a growing consensus among Republicans that the bill will never pass unless leadership, which has spent the last month crafting its own version of the House-passed bill, cuts off debate and calls a vote.

And there is precedent for that view. Almost all fiscal hawks voted for the megabill despite weeks of threats to torpedo it on the House floor. Two Republicans voted “no” and one voted “present,” allowing it to pass by a single vote last month.

“We call this the legislative process,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) said. “This is nothing new for those of us who were here previously. It’s not unusual. There’s a lot of discussion back and forth.”

That posturing has begun preemptively in the House, where Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-MD), the lone member to vote “present” last month, promised Tuesday not to allow the Senate to “jam” the lower chamber with its version of the bill.

Other Freedom Caucus members told the Washington Examiner they were also a “no” without the more aggressive rollback of green energy tax credits in the House legislation.

Mullin has moved closer to the House language on the SALT deduction, floating the same $40,000 cap with a lower income threshold, but SALT members have taken a pessimistic view of the talks.

Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY), a SALT Caucus member, told the New York Sun that the negotiations were “somewhere between stalled and dead” after a meeting with Mullin.

Mullin, meanwhile, has suggested Republicans in both chambers will simply have to settle for a compromise that no one finds satisfying. As of Tuesday morning, he told the Washington Examiner the income threshold was still being negotiated with SALT Republicans.

Those negotiations have taken place alongside rolling meetings with the parliamentarian, the nonpartisan arbiter of Senate rules. Sen. John Boozman (R-AR), the Agriculture Committee chairman, expected that a reworked proposal on food stamps would receive the “blessing” of leadership after Elizabeth MacDonough disqualified it under the filibuster-skirting rules of budget reconciliation.

Republicans are also awaiting her rulings on the tax portion of the bill after Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee spent two days challenging its provisions.

Thune has been working with Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), the Finance Committee chairman, on separate language to blunt the impact of the provider tax cap. One option floated by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is a relief fund that assists hospitals and nursing homes in rural communities.

But Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other so-called “Medicaid moderates” believe the fund would be insufficient and want leadership to revert to the House-passed language, which simply freezes the provider tax.

On Tuesday, Hawley predicted the legislation does not have the 51 votes to pass in its current form, calling the standoff over the tax far bigger than SALT.

“The rural hospital issue is the big issue right now,” Hawley said. “Rural hospitals affect the whole country, not like five people in the House.”

“All I can say is, they’ve got to solve it,” he added.

Thune has yet to win over fiscal hawks in his own chamber, though he has relied increasingly on Trump to soften their resistance. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said the president has asked for his support “every day” and on Monday visited the White House to discuss the megabill.

“He certainly wants to satisfy my requests, but my requests are probably not that easy to satisfy,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), another fiscal hawk who met with Trump.

Johnson has demanded that spending return to prepandemic levels and is holding out for a “forcing mechanism” to tackle further spending cuts at a later date.

Thune acknowledged Tuesday that he could lose a couple of Republicans later this week, when the Senate will hold its first procedural vote on the megabill, describing members of his conference as “independent-thinking.”

But he is betting Republicans will be reluctant to vote against the legislation, given its more popular provisions, including an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and money for the border and defense.

Thune has simultaneously brought in a rotating cast of senior Trump officials to argue for its passage. On Tuesday, Republicans invited Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to their lunch to brief the conference.

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“I think there is so much good in this that when people sit down to evaluate how they’re going to land in the end, you have to recognize that this is a process whereby everybody does not get what they want,” Thune said at his press conference.

“I think we produced a bill, working with the House, working with the White House, that will get the requisite number of Republican senators to vote for it,” he added.