Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to appear in Pennsylvania next week in an attempt to praise the legislation package signed into law last week by President Donald Trump.
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July 2 (UPI) — House members are meeting to debate U.S. President Donald Trump‘s key Senate-passed domestic policy bill, with lawmakers still aiming for a July 4 deadline to pass it.
Members went over over a key procedural vote Wednesday morning after the House Rules Committee pushed the Senate version overnight, setting the stage for a possibly dramatic and uncertain floor vote to pass Trump’s broad tax and spending bill.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a joint statement with House GOP leaders that they will “work quickly” to pass the bill and put it on Trump’s desk “in time for Independence Day.”
“Don’t let the Radical Left Democrats push you around,” Trump posted Wednesday morning on social media. “We’ve got all the cards, and we are going to use them.”
The new version of the legislation, titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes steeper cuts to Medicaid, a debt limit increase, rollbacks to green-energy policies, and changes to local and state tax deductions.
“All legislative tools and options are on the table,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Tuesday after the Senate vote.
It extends trillions in dollars in tax cuts, largely for the wealthiest Americans, but substantially cuts healthcare and other nutritional programs in order to partially beef-up border security and defense spending.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s Senate-passed bill would add at least $3.3 trillion to America’s debt over the next decade, which is a trillion-dollar increase from the bill’s last version.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has accused GOP lawmakers of “trying to rip away healthcare from 17 million Americans” with Medicaid cuts stemming from Republicans’ legislation.
Meanwhile, provisions stripped from the House included the sale of public land in over 10 states, a 10-year moratorium for states to regulate AI and an excise tax on the renewable energy industry.
“Every single House Democrat will vote ‘hell no’ against this one, big ugly bill,” Jeffries wrote.
On Wednesday, a GOP fiscal hawk was critical of the Senate’s new product.
It “violated both the spirit and the terms of our House agreement” in attempts to reduce the national debt, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told USA TODAY.
Any newer alterations in the House will again require Senate approval or force a committee conference of both the Senate and House to hash out a final version.
The initial version passed the House in a 215-214 vote in May and the Senate on Tuesday after a four-day “vote-a-rama” in a 51-50 vote that saw three GOP defections in the tie-breaker vote cast by Vice President JD Vance.
Meanwhile, the president is expected to meet at the White House with a handful of House Republicans to help bring his tax bill to the finish line. The hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus members also are expected to meet with Trump.
Rep. Mike Lawler, a moderate New York Republican, was seen Wednesday with other colleagues entering the West Wing, but it was not immediately clear which GOP lawmakers arrived.
It arrives in the face of what former White House adviser Elon Musk called in a June 30 X post “the biggest debt increase in history,” saying members of Congress who campaigned on spending reductions, “should hang their head in shame!” and added “they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”
“It’s unconscionable, it’s unacceptable, it’s un-American and House Democrats are committing to you that we’re going to do everything in our power to stop it,” according to Jeffries.
He called out Pennsylvania Republicans Rob Bresnahan, Scott Perry and their California House colleagues David Valadao and Young Kim, whose districts in particular will be hard hit by Trump’s medicaid cuts.
“All we need are four Republicans, just four,” added New York’s Jeffries.
June 2 (UPI) — Senate Republicans seek to make President Donald Trump‘s 2017 tax cuts permanent while Democrats push for a ruling from the Senate Parliamentarian as the chamber weigh’s Trump’s legislative agenda bill.
The Senate returned Monday to Capitol Hill after its Memorial Day recess with the sweeping agenda bill as its top priority. As it mulls changes to the bill, Republicans hope to extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act without an end date while not counting its financial impact toward the national debt.
To stop the Republican plan from coming to fruition, Democrats want the Parliamentarian of the United States, a nonpartisan body that interprets the rules of the Senate’s process, to weigh in.
Democrats argued that extending the 2017 tax cuts permanently would violate the Senate’s Byrd Rule, a rule that limits what can be considered in a budget reconciliation bill. This is significant because a budget reconciliation bill can be passed with a simple majority, or 51 votes, rather than the 60-vote threshold which is subject to filibuster rules.
Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate.
The Byrd Rule prohibits any provisions deemed extraneous from being included in a budget reconciliation bill. Among the characteristics that meet the criteria of an “extraneous” provision is a provision that increases the federal deficit beyond the budget window, which is typically 10 years.
Democrats say a permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts would do just that.
Democrats also say going around the Parliamentarian would undermine the Senate’s filibuster rules, alleging that Republicans already did this when they voted to overturn California’s electric vehicle mandate in May.
Senate Republicans invoked the Congressional Review Act to overturn the electric vehicle mandate without going through the Parliamentarian.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called on a series of votes to clarify whether the mandate was a rule that was being violated and thus able to be overturned under the Congressional Review Act.
Senate Republicans have set a goal to pass the legislative agenda bill by July 4. The 1,116-page bill passed the House before the break and needs Senate approval to advance to the president’s desk.
Some Republicans also have expressed their support for making changes to Trump’s legislative agenda bill. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has shared concerns about how it will add to the national debt if it is passed as is.
“If I vote for the $5 trillion debt, who’s left in Washington that cares about the debt?” Paul said in an interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday. “The GOP will own the debt once they vote for this.”
Paul opposes a provision in the bill that would raise the debt ceiling.
Changes to Medicaid are also a source of concern for some Republican Senators.
“I’ve said that if there are deep cuts in Medicaid that would endanger healthcare for low-income families, for disabled children, for other vulnerable populations, and for our rural hospitals, I’m simply not going to support that,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said last week when meeting with constituents in Clinton, Maine, according to Maine Public Radio.
May 20 (UPI) — President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill Tuesday to move those House Republicans who have so far chosen not to approve his legislative agenda bill to cease their opposition and move the legislation forward.
Trump was blunt in his dealings with conservative GOP representatives who want the bill to cut deeper into Medicaid.
He further pushed that message as he spoke to reporters outside the meeting and said of Medicaid that the bill would only cut “waste, fraud and abuse.”
The other GOP House faction he came to beseech are those who hail from mostly blue states and seek a higher cap on the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. Trump alleged that it’s the governors of blue states like New York, Illinois and California, who would benefit if they were to change the bill to up the SALT cap, “and those governors are the ones who blew it because they weren’t able to get it.”
In the closed-door session, Trump reportedly told those who held out for SALT should “leave it alone” and run with the bill as is.
However, so far Trump’s efforts have not encouraged the SALT faction to flip. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., told the press Tuesday he still plans to vote no on the bill, but that Trump does understand that it’s “imperative to get a deal done and a bill passed.”
New York GOP Reps. Nick LaLota and Andrew Garbarino have also said they remain a no.
There are also Republicans who are hardline against a SALT cap raise.
“Republicans going to bat for tax deductions that will primarily benefit limousine liberals in blue states,” said Thomas Massie, R-Ky., in an X post Tuesday, “This carve out for affluent people in states like NY and California will increase the deficit substantially and is a reversal of Trump’s first term tax policy.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., remains steadfast that he wants the bill passed by the House by May 26, which is Memorial Day, but as of Tuesday those GOP House members with gripes have put the bill’s movement in neutral.
The press office for Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, posted to social media Tuesday that Roy has said “We all are here to advance the agenda that the President ran on and that we all ran on,” but added “I don’t think the bill is exactly where it needs to be, yet.”
SACRAMENTO — Latino legislators criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget cuts to Medi-Cal Monday afternoon, saying the plan to freeze enrollment and charge premiums for those adult immigrants without documentation already enrolled was a betrayal of California’s promise to protect the vulnerable.
Legislative pushback for the May budget revision, released by Newsom last week, comes after the governor announced an additional $12-billion budget shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year.
State Senator María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) said the plan to charge adult undocumented immigrants $100 per month for Medi-Cal was a form of redlining, and Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda) said she doubted the two-tiered system was constitutional.
“The governor is proposing a troubling precedent — raising prices on one group of Californians based solely on their immigration status. It is illegal for Kaiser to do this. It is illegal for United Healthcare to do this. It is illegal for any doctor, hospital or clinic to charge higher prices to undocumented customers,” Durazo said at a California Latino Legislative Caucus rally outside the state Capitol on Monday.
The influential Latino Legislative Caucus has staunchly opposed cuts to Medi-Cal, the state’s expanded version of the federal Medicaid program. The objections come despite California expecting decreased revenue in part due to President Trump’s tariff policies and increases in state spending, including the recent expansion of Medi-Cal coverage to cover all eligible Californians, including immigrants lacking documentation.
State Senator Caroline Menjivar (D-Panorama City), chair of a budget subcommittee on health, said Newsom’s proposal scapegoats immigrants for California’s economic woes. Immigrants, she said, are essential to California’s robust economy, recently ranked as the fourth largest in the world.
“If you were to remove the name from this document — if you were to remove the state, and people would just read this off to you and you closed your eyes — you would think, ‘Oh, that’s a budget proposed by a Republican in, perhaps, Alabama,’” she said.
During his news conference on Wednesday, Newsom encouraged state lawmakers and specially members of the Latino caucus to offer alternatives to balance the state budget if they disagreed with his proposal.
“Good people have different ideas, and I look forward to their ideas,” Newsom said.
On Monday, members of the Latino caucus did not mention any specific measures they would take instead of cutting Medi-Cal access, but pledged to offer budget balancing proposals in the days and weeks to come.