Senate picks fight with House GOP on the "big, beautiful bill"
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the Capitol on Monday. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has picked a big intra-GOP fight on SALT, Medicaid and clean energy — all but ignoring some of the House's most delicate budget compromises.
🥊 Why it matters: Neither the House nor the Senate wants to go to a formal conference, but the Senate text released Monday afternoon showed just how extensive, and contentious, the conference-like negotiations will be.
- "That would be a big mistake," Majority Leader John Thune told Axios about an actual conference between the House and Senate. "That would drag this thing out."
Zoom in: Members of the House SALT caucus were outraged that the limit was reduced from $40,000 to $10,000 in the Senate text.
- "Everyone knows this 10K number will have to go up. And it will," Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said on X.
💰 To help pay for his priorities, Crapo cut deeper on Medicaid and reopened the debate on the provider tax.
- The House wanted to cap the provider tax threshold at 6% for Medicaid expansion states, but the Senate version plans to gradually lower the threshold to 3.5% in 2031.
- Crapo also put limits on how much can be deducted for President Trump's key priorities — no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on seniors.
On energy tax credits, Crapo wants to allow more projects to claim them before the credits sunset.
- Crapo also reduced the child tax credit from the House-passed $2,500 to $2,200.
🏈 Even the House's Trump-supported provision to strip sports team owners of a lucrative tax break was ignored.
- And on the so-called "revenge tax" on foreign subsidiaries, the Senate watered down the House language and delayed its implementation until 2027.
The first test will be getting 51 senators on board, and just a few hours after the text came out, it was already on shaky ground in the Senate.
- "We're further away than we were before," one GOP senator told us after leaving a meeting tonight with the rest of the conference to discuss the bill.
- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he's a "no."
- Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) blasted the changes to Medicaid.
Other Republicans were eerily quiet or said they needed time for review.
Between the lines: For Democrats, the deeper cuts to Medicaid and scaled-back child tax credit are ready-made to blast the GOP.
- "This could lead to even more than the 16 million people expected to lose health insurance and the hundreds of hospitals and health centers facing higher risk of closure," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said of the bill on X.
