Senate Republicans seek major changes to House-passed Trump budget bill

[mystery-ak]

 Senate Republicans seek major changes to House-passed Trump budget bill
by Al Weaver - 02/27/25 6:00 AM ET

Senate Republicans are staring down a major fight to overhaul the House’s budget resolution as lawmakers eye big changes.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), with the help of President Trump’s muscle, was able to get the House’s plan to enact Trump’s sweeping legislative agenda past a key hurdle on Tuesday.

But even as Senate Republicans say they’re relieved the House was able to advance the measure, they’re also crying foul that it wouldn’t make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent and fretting about the deep cuts to Medicaid that would be required to finance the House’s plan.

Now, the effort to advance Trump’s priorities enters a new stage with both sides attempting something they’ve been unable to do since late last year: get on the same page.

“It’s complicated. It’s hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). “There are some things that we need to work with the House package to expand upon.”

Republicans are aiming to pass large swaths of Trump’s agenda using a process called budget reconciliation, which bypasses the Senate filibuster. A budget resolution unlocks that process and serves sets parameters lawmakers must follow when they craft a final bill.

Earlier this month the Senate, fed up with the House’s lack of action on its plan to advance Trump’s single “big, beautiful bill,” moved their own budget resolution for the first part of a two-pronged approach.

The House’s vote on Tuesday, however, has put the onus back on Senate Republicans, leaving them trying to insert some of their top priorities into one gargantuan package.

Headlining that list is making the Trump tax cuts permanent, which Thune and other top Republicans have laid out as their red line in negotiations. The House’s budget resolution would extend the cuts, but caps them at $4.5 trillion, which isn’t enough to make them permanent.

Buoying Thune and company’s hopes is that they seemingly got the president on board with their plan as he posted his support for it early on Wednesday.

“Now, the work starts over here,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) told reporters, pointing to significant changes the Senate is looking to make to the House bill.

more
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5166001-senate-republicans-house-trump-budget-bill/

[Fishrrman]

"Senate Republicans seek major changes to House-passed Trump budget bill"

Those fools are gonna screw things up, but good...

[Bigun]

"Senate Republicans seek major changes to House-passed Trump budget bill"

Those fools are gonna screw things up, but good...

Exactly as planned.

[The_Reader_David]

The Senate GOP happen to be right on this.  The tax cuts need to be made permanent (or if not all of them, at least the qualified business income deduction that puts sole proprietorships on an equal footing with incorporated small businesses tax-wise). And without some sort of fix, cutting Medicaid, other than on the basis of finding actual fraud on a massive scale (which has yet to be found, despite hints it exists) and cutting the expenditures it created without cutting benefits or already substandard payments to providers*, will turn into a losing political issue. 

*I know what Medicaid pays compared to other insurers, since I run the back-office for my wife's psychology practice.  She doesn't do pro bono work, but she takes Medicaid, regarding it as quasi-pro-bono since for most services she provides, it pays about 2/3 what commercial insurers pay, while for some it pays less than half.

[libertybele]