Trump makes case for ‘big, beautiful bill’ and cranks up pressure on Republicans

Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make that case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen if his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.

The president’s intervention comes as Senate majority leader John Thune mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, ahead of a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.

But it is unclear if Republicans have the votes to pass it through Congress’s upper chamber, and whether any changes the Senate makes will pass muster in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority passed the bill last month by a single vote and which may have to vote again on a revised version of the bill.

Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.

“There are hundreds of things here. It’s so good,” he said. But he made no mention of his desire to sign the legislation by next Friday – the US Independence Day holiday – instead encouraging his audience to contact their lawmakers to get the bill over the finish line.

“If you can, call your senators, call your congressmen. We have to get the vote,” he said.

Democrats have dubbed the bill the “big, ugly betrayal”, and railed against its potential cut to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low income and disabled people. The legislation would impose the biggest funding cut to Medicaid since it was created in 1965, and cost an estimated 16 million people their insurance.

It would also slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps Americans afford food.

Republicans intend to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate by using the budget reconciliation procedure, under which they can pass legislation with just a majority vote, provided it only affects spending, revenue and the debt limit. But on Thursday, Democrats on the Senate budget committee announced that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, had ruled that a change to taxes that states use to pay for Medicaid was not allowed under the rules of reconciliation.

That could further raise the cost of the bill, which the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated would add a massive $4.2tn to the US budget deficit over 10 years. Such a high cost may be unpalatable to rightwing lawmakers in the House who are demanding aggressive spending cuts, but the more immediate concern for the GOP lies in the Senate, where several moderate lawmakers still have not said they are a yes vote on the bill.

“I don’t think anybody believes the current text is final, so I don’t believe anybody would vote for it in it’s current form. We [have] got a lot of things that we’re working on,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a top target of Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, told CNN on Wednesday.

In an interview with the Guardian last week, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski declined to say how she would vote on the bill, instead describing it as “a work in progress” and arguing that the Senate should “not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can”.

Democrats took credit for MacDonough’s ruling on the Medicaid tax, with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying the party “successfully fought a noxious provision that would’ve decimated America’s healthcare system and hurt millions of Americans. This win saves hundreds of billions of dollars for Americans to get healthcare, rather than funding tax cuts to billionaires.”