Republicans Don’t Love Trump’s Big Bill. They’re Rushing To Pass It Anyway.

WASHINGTON — Republicans are racing to send a massive tax and spending bill to President Donald Trump’s desk by the July Fourth holiday despite deep intraparty misgivings in both chambers of Congress about how it would bust open the federal debt and make politically unpopular cuts to health care for the poor. 

Republican leadership is essentially telling GOP critics of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill to put up or shut up, daring them to stand in the way of the president’s signature (and only) legislative priority: a tax cut package for the mostly wealthy totaling over $4 trillion paid in part by raiding the social safety net. 

“We have a lot of independent-thinking senators,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. “At the end of the day, we have a process that not everyone is going to get what they want.”

“Everybody has to say yes or no,” he added. “When push comes to shove, you’re looking at whether you would allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.”

Thune wants the Senate to vote on its version of the bill this week, and then kick it back to the House for final approval before sending the bill to Trump’s desk. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has warned the Senate repeatedly not to make too many changes that could derail its support in the narrowly GOP-controlled lower chamber. And he’s warned House members that they should keep their schedules open for the next week — July Fourth recess be damned. 

On Tuesday, Johnson scoffed at the multiple Senate Republicans suggesting they would vote against the bill over their specific concerns. After all, he saw similar threats evaporate in the House when it came time to advance its version of the bill last month. 

“They’re going through the five stages of grief on their individual preferences, as we did over here,” Johnson said. “I remain very optimistic that there is not going to be a wide chasm between the two products.”

Several Republican senators are uneasy about the bill’s cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to over 70 million Americans, including in many red states. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who faces reelection next year in a battleground state, warned his colleagues this week that over 600,000 North Carolinians will be at risk of losing coverage if the bill becomes law, according to Punchbowl News. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also wants more financial support for rural hospitals that could lose critical funding as a result of the legislation.

“I’ve heard a lot of people talking about rural hospitals and the need to keep them open. I’ve heard double-digit members express concerns about that,” Hawley told reporters on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a group of conservative senators is pushing for deeper spending cuts included in the bill. The massive tax package would add $4.2 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Republican senators insist it would add much less to the debt when larger economic growth is factored into the equation — though past predictions about how tax cuts would pay for themselves have always been wrong in the end.

“We’re trying to rush this. We haven’t taken the time to go line by line, project by project,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Tuesday.

GOP leaders can afford to lose no more than three votes in the Senate to pass the bill under a special fast-track process known as budget reconciliation. 

And in the House, members of the far-right Freedom Caucus are insisting that this time, for real, they will actually vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with the changes that Senate Republicans are making, particularly their softer phaseouts of green energy tax credits. 

“If the Senate tries to jam the House with this version, I won’t vote ‘present.’ I’ll vote NO,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the Freedom Caucus chair whose “present” vote helped his party pass the bill last month by a one-vote margin, wrote on social media Tuesday. 

The Freedom Caucus has rolled over on every major spending bill of Trump’s second presidency due in large part to private and public pressure from the president himself. Trump’s attacks against Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a vocal opponent of the bill, and threats to primary him, will likely serve as a warning to Massie’s colleagues who may be also thinking about voting “no.”

Meanwhile, House Republicans from New York are furious that the Senate might scale back a tax deduction for what wealthy homeowners pay in state and local taxes. The House bill quadrupled the size of the so-called SALT deduction to $40,000, while the Senate Finance Committee’s draft of the tax provisions left it flat at $10,000. 

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a recent former House member, has been in constant communication with members of the House SALT caucus but said he didn’t necessarily expect them to give. 

“We’re just gonna make it hopefully appeasing enough, but not loving it, that they would support it,” Mullin told HuffPost.

Ultimately, Republicans are desperate to avoid a messy and drawn-out scenario where the House and Senate try to hash out their many differences in a conference committee. That will require the vast majority of the GOP to bite their tongue and swallow a legislative product they readily acknowledge isn’t great and one that has been polling terribly. 

“It’s not going to be anything that all of us absolutely love,” Mullin added. “I don’t think there’s anything that we’re saying this is the best bill ever. This is a really good start moving us all in the right direction.”