The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a key Medicaid provider tax overhaul that is central to President Donald Trump’s big tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to procedural rules.
Guidance from the parliamentarian is rarely ignored and Republican leaders are now forced to consider difficult options. Republicans were counting on big cuts to Medicaid and other programs to offset trillions of dollars in Trump tax breaks, their top priority. Additionally, the parliamentarian, who is the Senate’s chief arbiter of its often complicated rules, advised against various GOP provisions barring certain immigrants from health care programs.
Republicans scrambled Thursday to respond, with some calling for challenging, or ever firing, the nonpartisan parliamentarian, who has been on the job since 2012, though GOP leaders dismissed those views. Instead, they worked to revise the various proposals.
“We have contingency plans,” said Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota.
Friday’s expected votes appeared to be slipping, but Thune insisted that “we’re plowing forward.”
But Democrats, who are unified against package as a tax giveaway for the wealthy at the expense of American safety net programs, said the procedural decisions would devastate the GOP package.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the Republican proposals would have meant $250 billion less for the health care program, “massive Medicaid cuts that hurt kids, seniors, Americans with disabilities and working families.”
The outcome is a setback as Senate Republicans race toward a weekend session to pass the bill and send it back to the House for another vote before Trump’s Fourth of July deadline. Trump hosted House Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP lawmakers in the East Room at the White House joined by truck drivers, firefighters, tipped workers, ranchers and others that the administration says will benefit from the bill.
“We don’t want to have grandstanders,” Trump said of the GOP holdouts.
Trump said there are “hundreds of things” in the emerging package of tax breaks, spending cuts and bolstered money to carry out his mass deportation plans. “It’s so good.”
At its core, the big bill, which has passed the House and is now being revised in the Senate, includes $3.
