Senate Republicans are embarking Thursday afternoon on an amendment free-for-all expected to keep lawmakers voting through the night — all to green-light a fiscal blueprint President Donald Trump doesn’t favor.
The budget measure the Senate is on track to adopt at the end of an arduous “vote-a-rama” sets a framework for a party-line package of energy policy, defense spending and border security investments. But Trump wants trillions of dollars in tax cuts rolled in, and so do Republicans on the other side of the Capitol.
After Trump publicly urged Senate Republicans this week to back off their approach, GOP senators are forging ahead with a budget they characterize as a fallback plan to deploy if Speaker Mike Johnson can’t rally virtually all of his conference’s 218 lawmakers around a budget setting up the one “big, beautiful bill” the president and House GOP leaders fancy.
“To my House colleagues, we will all get there together. If you can pass the ‘one big, beautiful bill’ that makes the tax cuts permanent — not four or five years — then we’ll all cheer over here,” Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on the chamber floor as he kicked off debate. “I want that to happen. But I cannot sit on the sidelines and not have a Plan B.”
The exercise is not without political cost — or lost sleep. To approve their budget plan, Senate Republicans will be allowing Democrats to offer as many amendments as they want as the minority party seeks to pin GOP senators on supporting cuts to safety net programs and tax perks for the nation’s highest earners.
Typically the Senate votes on around 40 proposed tweaks to a budget resolution during the protracted amendment spree. The last two times the Senate adopted a budget resolution, the “vote-a-rama” ended around 5 a.m.
“You can expect a late night with a lot of amendments to point out this whole painful exercise is being done to strip money out of the Treasury to give big favors to billionaires,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a brief interview.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer plans to offer an amendment that calls for repealing tax cuts for wealthy Americans and another that would block Republicans from enacting tax cuts under the plan if they cut Medicaid by even $1.
Other amendments from Senate Democrats will fall under three broad themes: stopping the Trump administration from dismantling federal agencies and freezing funding Congress already enacted; opposing tax cuts for the richest taxpayers; and blocking spending cuts that affect services like health care, housing support and food assistance.
Some Republican senators are going into the vote-a-rama with bad feelings, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who announced their opposition following Trump’s comments.
“I’m not voting for a budget framework that facilitates more taxpayer money to Ukraine. Period,” Hawley posted on social media this week.
Ultimately, the Senate’s vote to adopt the budget resolution won’t actually unlock the filibuster-skirting power Republicans want to harness to enact a package along party lines to deliver on Trump’s domestic agenda. To gain that “privileged” status for a final bill, both the House and Senate need to adopt identical budget measures, and whipping a fiscal framework will be a challenge in the House.
As House GOP leaders forge ahead with their grander vision for a party-line package that includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, they are trying to manage opposition from vulnerable Republican incumbents uncomfortable with cutting safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP food assistance by at least $1.5 trillion over a decade, as prescribed by the House’s framework.
Any concessions to appease swing-district Republicans are likely to cost House GOP leaders votes from fiscal hawks rooting for those cuts.
