President Donald Trump worked the phones Monday and took to social media to try to sway Republican holdouts on his multi-trillion dollar tax bill, encountering conflicting demands from GOP senators even as he urged them to move swiftly.The legislation, which last month passed the House by one vote, faces opposition from both moderates and ultra-conservatives in the Senate, where Trump can afford to lose no more than three votes.
“With the Senate coming back to Washington today, I call on all of my Republican friends in the Senate and House to work as fast as they can to get this Bill to MY DESK before the Fourth of JULY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president gave lawmakers at odds with one another the feeling that he was on their side.Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who wants more deficit reduction and also opposes clean energy cuts in the House bill, said he expected Senate leaders to present Trump with a draft of tax and Medicaid revisions by this weekend. But he acknowledged that the process could take much longer.Republicans, Tillis said, have to put ideas from senators “in the funnel and get a work product, I’d say over the next ten days, ten-to-fifteen days.”That tight timeframe would be needed to get the legislation to Trump’s desk by his July 4 deadline but would be hard to meet.If the Senate passes a revised bill, the House must then take it up again. And any changes risk undoing the fragile coalition that narrowly supported the measure in that chamber.Senate Republican leaders intend to make permanent many of the temporary tax cuts in the House bill, a move that would increase the bill’s more than $2.5 trillion deficit impact. Yet doing so risks alienating fiscal hawks already at war with party moderates over the bill’s safety-net cuts.The biggest of those is the House bill’s cuts to Medicaid, which are projected to end health care coverage for about 7.7 million people by changing eligibility requirements.Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said in a mid-afternoon social media post that he “just had a great talk” with the president on the legislation and they agreed no Medicaid benefits would be cut.Hawley later said he supports the House bill’s work requirements, as well as efforts to go after fraud, but opposes that measure’s changes to the Medicaid provider tax and cost sharing. The House legislation seeks to limit a practice whereby states tax hospitals and other Medicaid providers in order to bolster their federal reimbursement levels, a move critics call an accounting gimmick. It also imposes new copays on Medicaid beneficiaries.The senator added that the president made clear to him he didn’t support making even deeper cuts to Medicaid than in the House bill that some Senate Republicans are demanding.Trump also spoke with Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a GOP holdout who said he wants to cut the budget from more than the current level of more than $7 trillion to between $5.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion. Johnson said Trump was receptive to his ideas. Johnson said he’d sit down with Trump’s economic team to review the numbers and would be open to something similar to the House bill with assurances of legislation later that makes deeper cuts. “I want to work with the president,” Johnson said.Trump also met Monday with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whose said they discussed many subjects including “a lot about the big beautiful bill.”
