Why the GOP’s megabill isn’t a done deal yet

By Michael Jones

With the Senate returning to Washington this evening after a weeklong Memorial Day recess, the chamber’s Republican majority is now on the clock to do what their House counterparts did before the break: Pass a sprawling tax, immigration, and energy package that delivers the bulk of President Trump’s legislative agenda.

Senate Democrats are clear-eyed. They know they can’t block the GOP’s megabill outright. The budget process—known as reconciliation—limits debate and allows passage with a simple majority, which Republicans have.

But they can go to war over it. And they plan to.

“Families will lose health care, families will lose food benefits, families will lose jobs, families will lose money,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters the afternoon following House passage of the bill. “The reason? Because the Republicans want a billionaire tax giveaway.”

Schumer said he and his members would fight the bill tooth and nail to exploit the divisions within the Senate Republican Conference and the reservations that certain senators share over controversial policy proposals.

Going forward, expect a full-court messaging blitz: floor speeches, press conferences, social media threads, and coordinated statements framing the bill as a windfall for wealthy Republican donors and a direct hit to working families.

“We know that a lot of Republicans on the Senate side are squirmy about the Medicaid cuts, the disparity in the taxes, the clean energy cuts, et cetera,” Schumer said. “And we urge everyone to make sure that they call their Republican senators and say, ‘Don’t vote for this billionaire tax scam.’”

Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) spoke Sunday to align strategy. And Schumer has also invited three top House Democrats—Reps. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the ranking members on the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Budget Committees—to brief Senate Democrats this week on what they learned in the House fight.

“When we fight side by side, our voice is louder and our case is stronger,” Schumer wrote to Senate Democrats on Sunday evening. “And in this moment, unity isn’t optional, it’s our strongest weapon in defending American families.”

And as a personal matter, the megabill fight also gives Schumer a chance to regain trust with the Democratic base after a bruising government funding battle this spring, when he and a handful of leadership-aligned Senate Democrats voted to help Republicans avoid a shutdown—despite near-unanimous Democratic opposition in the House and without securing any meaningful policy concessions. That vote, viewed by many progressives as a capitulation, left lingering frustration across the party. With Trump’s signature legislative package on the line, Schumer has a high-profile opportunity to reset the narrative and rally Democrats around a unified front.

After House Republicans narrowly passed Trump’s megabill, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had one main ask for the Senate: Don’t mess it up.

It took a monumental whip effort to unite fiscal conservatives demanding deep safety-net cuts and blue-state Republicans fighting for a higher SALT deduction cap. The bill barely cleared the House after days of drama. The fear inside GOP leadership is that if the Senate makes too many changes, that delicate balance could fall apart fast.

But Senate Republicans have their own internal fractures—and no real obligation to protect the fragile deal Johnson stitched together. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is already facing pressure from all sides: some moderate and populist Republicans like Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) want to soften the proposed Medicaid cuts and new eligibility restrictions, which the Congressional Budget Office warns could leave more than 16 million people without coverage. 

At the same time, fiscal hawks like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) say the House bill doesn’t cut spending enough, warning the national debt could hit $60 trillion in the next decade if they don’t go bigger.

And then there’s Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who wants the entire debt ceiling increase stripped from the bill altogether. Without that, he’s threatening to walk.

The Senate is also expected to revisit several of the bill’s headline provisions. A partial restoration of clean energy tax credits will likely be driven by an ideologically diverse group of Republicans defending local projects back home. The $40,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, which helped get the bill through the House, may not survive intact. And a proposed cap on graduate student loans and elimination of key forgiveness programs has sparked warnings from doctors’ groups about worsening the country’s physician shortage.

Even Trump himself hasn’t drawn a hard line. “I want the Senate and the senators to make the changes they want,” the president said last week. “I think they are going to have changes. Some will be minor, some will be fairly significant.” For Speaker Johnson, that wasn’t exactly reassuring.

But Senate Republicans have to contend with more than just internal divisions. 

The Byrd Rule—a procedural constraint named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.)—could force them to strip out parts of the bill that don’t directly impact the federal budget. That means several House-passed provisions, from regulating artificial intelligence to restricting gender-affirming care, may not survive the Senate’s so-called “Byrd Bath.”

Time is also working against them. Any Senate changes must be quickly approved by the House to meet Republicans’ July 4 deadline. 

Whether or not Trump ultimately gets to sign his so-called “big, beautiful bill” into law, Democrats say the damage is already done. They argue the GOP’s push to gut the safety net to reward billionaires and boost corporate profits could backfire—just as it did in 2017, when Republicans tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and lost the House the following year.

Before the House vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Jeffries marked it as the day Republicans may have lost their majority. Hours later, his Brooklyn Democratic counterpart in the Senate followed suit.

“Based on what the House has passed, our chances of taking back the Senate have just increased. Because while Republicans claim that their tax scam will lift America across the board, the American people see it’s just plain false,” Schumer said, despite facing a tougher path back to the majority in the Senate than Jeffries does in the House. “The fact that the Republican Party stands for slashing Medicaid and slashing SNAP and wrangling Social Security all to give tax breaks for the billionaires helps us.”

Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.