Trump Demands House Rubber-Stamp Senate’s (Not So) ‘Beautiful Bill’

It’s all up to these two dudes now. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

When Donald Trump’s giant budget-reconciliation bill cleared the House on May 22 without a single vote to spare, there were abundant warnings that the Senate couldn’t mess with the delicate balance of promises, deals, and compromises the lower chamber’s Republicans worked out lest the whole thing collapse like a Jenga tower. There were three particularly intense red lines for key House GOP factions: no additional Medicaid cuts that would upset swing-district moderates; no tampering with the reinflation of the SALT deduction decimated in 2017, a key demand of high-tax-state members; and no additional deficit spending (especially on maintaining clean-energy subsidies enacted under Joe Biden) to enrage the fiscal hawks of the House Freedom Caucus.

Anyone familiar with the exceptionally high self-regard of U.S. senators knows that they aren’t about to be told what to do by the lilliputians of the House, even if they share a partisan identification and a common loyalty to the 47th president. So in crafting their own version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the upper chamber’s Republicans crossed all three of those red lines in order to pass the bill without a single vote to spare. Now both the Senate and Trump himself want the House to just rubber-stamp it. Any doubt about White House expectations was dashed by this Truth Social post:

Almost all of our Great Republicans in the United States Senate have passed our “ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL.” It is no longer a “House Bill” or a “Senate Bill”. It is everyone’s Bill. There is so much to be proud of, and EVERYONE got a major Policy WIN — But, the Biggest Winner of them all will be the American People, who will have Permanently Lower Taxes, Higher Wages and Take Home Pay, Secure Borders, and a Stronger and More Powerful Military. Additionally, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Benefits are not being cut, but are being STRENGTHENED and PROTECTED from the Radical and Destructive Democrats by eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse from those Programs.

We can have all of this right now, but only if the House GOP UNITES, ignores its occasional “GRANDSTANDERS” (You know who you are!), and does the right thing, which is sending this Bill to my desk. We are on schedule — Let’s keep it going, and be done before you and your family go on a July 4thvacation. The American People need and deserve it. They sent us here to, GET IT DONE!

Politico Playbook reports that Trump has cleared his schedule for July 2 in anticipation of a full day spent twisting arms. Since July 4 is just two days away, there’s no time for anything other than a bill exactly as the Senate has left it, even though it includes more draconian Medicaid cuts than the House bill; much more red ink thanks to the Senate’s insistence on making business tax cuts permanent and restoring some clean-energy subsidies; and a tweak to the allegedly inviolable House SALT deal. Oh, and there were also lots of deals giving special favors to senators who made noise, particularly the sweet deals for Alaska on Medicaid and SNAP cuts necessary to bring aboard Lisa Murkowski, along with a slush fund to cushion the impact of the Senate’s Medicaid-provider tax clampdown on some but not all of the hospitals affected by it. Yet House Republicans are supposed to swallow it all without losing more than two votes (Thomas Massie is assumed to be a “no” from the get-go).

There will be much private and some public grousing about this expectation, of course, and the thing to watch is what congressional Republicans and the Trump administration will offer potential rebels to make their medicine go down more easily. On Medicaid, there could always be quiet promises that the program’s regulator, the former would-be senator Mehmet Oz, will be accommodating in giving particular states waivers that ease some of the pain. On SALT, there could be promises of future legislative relief down the road.

For fiscal hawks there are two available palliatives. First, House Freedom Caucus types will be encouraged to embrace an enormous but convenient lie relied on by the Senate: that extending 2017 tax cuts has no impact on the budget deficit. That turns the $3 trillion of red ink into a bill that’s in the black on paper. If that’s not enough, Speaker Mike Johnson can repeat his suggestion that he’ll come back with a second budget reconciliation later in the year that will whack some more spending. And the administration could also offer to execute some more spending cuts via the appropriations process that is unfolding in Congress on a separate track from budget reconciliation. Indeed, OMB director Russell Vought would probably love that. It’s possible federal programs that have survived DOGE and OMB cuts could yet be gutted as blood offerings to Chip Roy and other House militants who are angry that Elon Musk didn’t create more carnage than he did.

Other than side deals and future promises, we’ll hear J.D. Vance’s closing argument over and over:

The idea is that the megabill will speed the money to ICE necessary to deport the undocumented immigrants who will otherwise raid the Treasury (not true) and march to the polls (they can’t) to turn the federal government back over to the Marxist Democrat Party that wants to replace Americans with the dregs of the third world. It’s a pack of lies, even by Vance’s standards, but it may be persuasive to some House Republicans furious that the megabill doesn’t inflict more pain.

In the end, of course, the most important final argument for the Senate version of the bill is that Donald Trump has demanded support for it. Ping-ponging the legislation between the House and the Senate some more is a recipe for disaster and much less satisfying all around than a decision to declare it all done and join together to celebrate an Independence Day that will, among other things, represent independence from the agony of enacting this unpopular legislation. Only then can congressional Republicans take a nice long recess and focus on raising money for their reelection campaigns, which will be tougher thanks to this big and not-so-beautiful bill.