{"id":40631,"date":"2025-04-05T03:42:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-05T08:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=40631"},"modified":"2025-04-05T06:14:52","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T11:14:52","slug":"senate-adopts-new-budget-for-trumps-agenda-after-gop-divisions-emerge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=40631","title":{"rendered":"Senate adopts new budget for Trump’s agenda after GOP divisions emerge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Senate Republicans voted to approve their sweeping budget plan<\/a> in the early hours of Saturday morning with the aim of eventually passing President Donald Trump’s agenda along party lines in one massive bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 51-48 vote included support from every Republican except Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. But the tally masks the tensions that emerged in the run-up to the vote, which revealed new fissures within the party about a range of issues \u2014 from Medicaid to tax cuts to blowing up the debt \u2014 and pointed to how difficult it will be to get a measure through both chambers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said he has \u201ca big concern\u201d about Medicaid cuts in the legislation, and said he only agreed to back<\/a> the budget after Trump made an \u201cunequivocal\u201d promise to him that the bill won\u2019t cut Medicaid benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawley wasn’t alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said that cutting the health insurance program<\/a> \u201cwould be very harmful to people in Maine and to our rural hospitals and other health care providers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collins said the House-passed version of the budget \u201ctroubles me greatly, because I believe it inevitably would lead to significant cuts in Medicaid.\u201d The two chambers will have to settle on one bill in order for it to land on Trump’s desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut we\u2019ve got a long ways to go,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Republicans avoid Medicaid cuts, the legislation is likely to blow an even bigger hole in the budget through massive tax cuts and spending increases on immigration enforcement and the military, which are core instructions in the budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republican leaders are hoping to hide the cost of their tax breaks by using a budget trick<\/a> known as \u201ccurrent policy\u201d baseline, which would treat a permanent extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts as costing nothing. But despite the accounting method the Senate uses for bookkeeping, extending the tax cuts would still add to the national debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The practical consequences of this is that using ‘current policy’ increases the cost of this bill by $3.8 trillion,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said on the Senate floor. “It establishes a dangerous precedent. It might be within the rules to do so, but it doesn\u2019t mean that it is wise to do so. And to be a conservative is to know that sometimes you don\u2019t open Pandora\u2019s box, even if you can.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s also unclear whether Republicans will be allowed to use that method if Democrats challenge it with the parliamentarian and she rules against the approach. Several GOP senators, including Collins and Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, insist they won’t overrule the parliamentarian if they don’t get their way on the scoring method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA red line for me is removing the filibuster; another red line for me is overruling the parliamentarian,\u201d Curtis told NBC News. \u201cBoth of those kind of came into play” this week, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cassidy added, “I have been assured that there is a commitment in other ways to pay for an eventual reconciliation bill.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nobody knows how that would work, particularly with Republicans taking Medicare and Medicaid off the table, with plans to expand military spending. Social Security is off limits in a reconciliation bill, which only requires a simple majority to pass. That leaves only a small slice of the budget to cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if the bill ends up adding trillions of dollars in red ink without provisions to pay for them, it could alienate conservative hardliners in the Senate, as well as the narrow House GOP majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The divisions between Senate Republicans and their House colleagues don’t stop there. Apart from House members eying larger spending cuts, there is a crucial faction of House Republicans in high-tax states like New York and California who want an expansion of the state and local tax deduction, which Trump capped in 2017. They insist their votes hinge on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But most Republicans in the House and the Senate oppose a bigger “SALT” deduction, which would also be expensive and limit the options for what other provisions the party can include in the bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saturday’s Senate vote instructs committees to craft legislation based on the parameters laid out in the budget resolution. It remains unclear whether the Senate and House will agree on the same budget before proceeding, or whether they’ll pass separate “reconciliation” bills and seek to negotiate a single version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the Senate voted to adopt the budget, Democrats forced votes on a series of amendments aimed at putting Republicans in a box politically, including one by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to block Trump’s tariffs if they cause higher costs for Americans, which GOP senators rejected by a vote of 46-53.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s tariff tax is one of the dumbest things he has ever done as president, and that\u2019s saying something,\u201d Schumer, D-N.Y., said. \u201cMarkets are plummeting. Six trillion dollars in values gone. The odds of a recession are rising.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Senate Republicans voted to approve their sweeping budget plan in the early hours of Saturday morning with the aim of eventually passing President Donald Trump’s agenda along party lines in one massive bill. The 51-48 vote included support from every Republican except Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. But the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":40632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3314,2066,1230],"class_list":["post-40631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-budget","tag-senate","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40633,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40631\/revisions\/40633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}