After ‘big, beautiful’ weekend, Senate nears home stretch on GOP budget reconciliation

WASHINGTON (CN) — As the sun rose on Independence Day week in Washington, the Senate returned to work on the Donald Trump administration’s massive domestic policy legislation, kicking off a voting marathon that threatens to drag into the small hours of Tuesday morning.

The so-called “vote-a-rama” in the upper chamber represents the final hurdle for Senate Republicans looking to approve the megabill, which packages together an assortment of Trump’s policy priorities. The GOP, however, will need to contend not only with staunch Democratic opposition but a handful of holdouts within their own party who threaten to scuttle the whole process.

Republicans for weeks have been debating their sweeping budget reconciliation measure, dubbed “One Big Beautiful Bill” in the parlance of the president. The House last month passed its version of the legislation, but all eyes have been on the Senate where some GOP lawmakers have examined its provisions with a more critical eye.

Monday’s vote series, which is expected to last all day and into the night, will see senators debate and vote on a raft of amendments offered by both Democrats and Republicans.

The morning kicked off with a vote on a measure which allowed Republicans to change the Senate’s accounting methods, helping them paper over nearly $4 trillion in costs associated with extending tax cuts first implemented during Trump’s first term. Though Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, decried the move as “fake math and budgetary hocus-pocus,” it narrowly passed the chamber.

It was an early win for Republicans who have long framed the budget reconciliation package as a vehicle for cutting costs. The Congressional Budget Office forecast over the weekend that the tax language in the megabill could add as much as $3.3 trillion to the national debt.

The vote-a-rama comes at the end of an unusual weekend work period for senators, as Republicans scramble to pass their budget package before their self-imposed July 4 deadline. Democrats, angling to slow the process to a crawl, demanded that the measure’s nearly 1,000 pages be read on the Senate floor, a process which began Saturday night and stretched for 16 hours into Sunday.

And a procedural ballot on Sunday laid bare potential Republican challenges to the sweeping budget legislation.

Some Senate Republicans have bristled at some of the measure’s provisions, such as a proposal to slash certain funding for Medicaid, including North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis who joined Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in voting against a motion to proceed on the legislation.

Tillis’ opposition sparked intense backlash from Trump, who wrote in a flurry of posts on his social media platform Truth Social over the weekend that he would support a primary challenger for the Tar Heel State lawmaker.

“Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!” the president wrote.

In a statement Sunday, Tillis announced that he would not seek reelection, writing that lawmakers who are willing to work across the aisle and “demonstrate independent thinking” were becoming less common on Capitol Hill, in an apparent dig at Trump’s grip on the Republican party.

“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” the North Carolina senator said.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how other Republican skeptics will vote on the budget reconciliation measure when it comes up for a final vote, which could happen early Tuesday morning after the Senate works through lawmaker amendments.

As usual, attention is likely to be on Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and Maine Senator Susan Collins, who have occasionally broken with Republicans and bucked the Trump administration. If Tillis and Paul vote against the package on final passage, just one more Republican defection would force a 50-50 tiebreaker vote from Vice President JD Vance. Murkowski and Collins could tank the measure altogether if they both refuse to back it.

Still, if the Senate passes Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” it will still need to clear a repeat vote in the House before it can head to the White House. The lower chamber is eyeing a Wednesday session for that vote.

In addition to extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the budget reconciliation package would also hike military spending and budget for border security — including for the administration’s mass deportation operations. The measure would also raise the debt ceiling ahead of a fiscal deadline looming in August.

Democrats have pointed out that the legislation would fund some of its sweeping provisions by cutting spending on federal aid programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, while cutting taxes for the country’s wealthiest people.

“It makes no sense to reward the billionaire class and special interests at the expense of everyone else,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday morning. “There’s nothing wrong with being wealthy, but they don’t need another tax break — and they certainly shouldn’t get a tax break by taking food from the mouths of hungry children.”

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