The Senate is preparing for a key procedural vote during a rare Saturday session as Republicans race to pass President Donald Trump’s package of tax breaks, spending cuts and bolstered deportation funds by his July Fourth deadline.

Republicans are using their majorities in Congress to push aside Democratic opposition, but they have run into a series of political and policy setbacks. Not all GOP lawmakers are on board with proposals to reduce spending on Medicaid, food stamps and other programs as a way to help cover the cost of extending some $3.8 trillion in Trump tax breaks.

Ahead of the expected roll call, the White House released a statement of administrative policy saying it “strongly supports passage” of the bill that “implements critical aspects” of the president’s agenda. Trump himself was at his golf course in Virginia on Saturday with GOP senators posting about it on social media.

“It’s time to get this legislation across the finish line,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

But as the day dragged on, billionaire Elon Musk lashed out, calling the package “utterly insane and destructive.”

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” the former top Trump aide said in a post.

The 940-page bill was released shortly before midnight Friday, and senators are expected to grind through the days ahead with hours of potentially all-night debate and countless amendments. Senate passage could be days away, and the bill would need to return to the House for a final round of votes before it could reach the White House.

With the narrow Republicans majorities in the House and Senate, leaders need almost every lawmaker on board in the face of essentially unified opposition from Democrats.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans dropped the bill “in the dead of night” and are rushing to finish the bill before the public fully knows what’s in it.

Make-or-break moment for GOP

The weekend session could be a make-or-break moment for Trump’s party, which has invested much of its political capital on his signature domestic policy plan. Trump is pushing Congress to wrap it up, even as he sometimes gives mixed signals, allowing for more time.

At recent events at the White House, including Friday, Trump has admonished the “grandstanders” among GOP holdouts to fall in line.

The legislation is an ambitious but complicated series of GOP priorities. At its core, it would make permanent many of the tax breaks from Trump’s first term that would otherwise expire by year’s end if Congress fails to act, resulting in a potential tax increase on Americans. The bill would add new breaks, including no taxes on tips, and commit $350 billion to national security, including for Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

But the spending cuts that Republicans are relying on to offset the lost tax revenues are causing dissent within the GOP ranks. Some lawmakers say the cuts go too far, particularly for people receiving health care through Medicaid. Meanwhile, conservatives, worried about the nation’s debt, are pushing for steeper cuts.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he remains concerned about the fundamentals of the package and will not support the procedural motion to begin debate. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been opposed to the measure to raise the nation’s debt limit by $5 trillion. And Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pushing for deeper cuts, said he needed to see the final legislative text.

GOP Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana said he would agree to proceeding to the bill only after being assured a provision for public lands sales he opposes would be taken out with an amendment.

After setbacks, Republicans revise some proposals

The release of that draft had been delayed as the Senate parliamentarianreviewed the bill to ensure it complied with the chamber’s strict “Byrd Rule,” named for the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va. It largely bars policy matters from inclusion in budget bills unless a provision can get 60 votes to overcome objections. That would be a tall order in a Senate with a 53-47 GOP edge and Democrats unified against Trump’s bill.

Republicans suffered a series of setbacks after several proposals were determined to be out of compliance by the chief arbiter of the Senate’s rules. One plan would have shifted some food stamp costs from the federal government to the states; a second would have gutted the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But over the past days, Republicans have quickly revised those proposals and reinstated them.

The final text includes a proposal for cuts to a Medicaid provider tax that had run into parliamentary objections and opposition from several senators worried about the fate of rural hospitals. The new version extends the start date for those cuts and establishes a $25 billion fund to aid rural hospitals and providers.

Most states impose the provider tax as a way to boost federal Medicaid reimbursements. Some Republicans argue that is a scam and should be abolished.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said that under the House-passed version of the bill, some 10.9 million more people would go without health care and at least 3 million fewer would qualify for food aid. The CBO has not yet publicly assessed the Senate draft, which proposes steeper reductions.

Top income-earners would see about a $12,000 tax cut under the House bill, while the package would cost the poorest Americans $1,600, the CBO said.

SALT dispute shakes things up

The Senate included a compromise over the so-called SALT provision, a deduction for state and local taxes that has been a top priority of lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, but the issue remains unsettled.

The current SALT cap is $10,000 a year, and a handful of Republicans wanted to boost it to $40,000 a year. The final draft includes a $40,000 cap, but for five years instead of 10.

Many Republican senators say that is still too generous. At least one House GOP holdout, Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, had said that would be insufficient.

Trump’s deadline nears

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sent his colleagues home for the weekend with plans to be on call to return to Washington, had said they are “very close” to finishing up.

“We would still like to meet that July Fourth, self-imposed deadline,” said Johnson, R-La.

Johnson and Thune have stayed close to the White House, relying on Trump to pressure holdout lawmakers.

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× Expand Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks to reporters at the Capitol, May 20, 2025, in Washington.

It’s refreshing in a way that we no longer have to spend much time thinking about the Senate parliamentarian, the shadowy figure whose rulings supposedly decide what the chamber can and cannot do. Republicans put that to bed last week by overruling the parliamentarian over whether a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution could nullify the Environmental Protection Agency’s waiver allowing California to set its own air pollution standards on vehicles.

California was given authority in a carve-out to the Clean Air Act in 1970 to set higher emissions standards than the national rules, with the EPA subsequently granting waivers more than 100 times. The state was prepared to use its latest waiver to effectively ban gas-powered auto sales by 2035. But the Senate voted 51-to-44 last week to cancel that waiver, as well as two other waivers to tighten emission rules on diesel trucks and allow zero-emission trucks on the road. The House had already voted for the resolution, so it can now be signed by President Trump.

Only executive branch agency rules can be overturned by a CRA resolution, and only within 60 legislative days after being presented to Congress, in an up-or-down vote that avoids the Senate filibuster. The Senate parliamentarian, joining the auditors at the Government Accountability Office, said that the EPA waivers were not “rules” as defined by the CRA, and therefore couldn’t be put into a resolution. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), in a communication he sent last Congress about these very EPA waivers, agreed that the “federal preemption waivers cannot be reviewed under the Congressional Review Act.”

Yet Senate Republicans said, “Tough, we’re doing it anyway.” And Lee voted with them.

More from David Dayen

California has already announced that it will sue to maintain its waiver, charging that the Senate had no authority to overturn it. But the Senate operates largely on precedent, and now that the parliamentarian has been disregarded on this point, virtually any action the executive branch takes could be construed as a rule, and therefore subject to fast-track congressional review.

For this reason, Democrats could subject the Senate to time-consuming resolution votes repeatedly, to such a degree that the Senate would not have time to do anything else for the rest of this session of Congress. In other words, Democrats could respond to the waiver vote by paralyzing the Senate, and stopping the giant Trump tax bill from ever reaching the floor.

Georgia State University assistant professor and former House Oversight Committee staffer Todd Phillips laid this out in a Prospect piece earlier this month. Any 30 senators can force a CRA resolution onto the floor, with a required ten hours of debate time. These resolutions would need the president’s signature, and nearly all of them wouldn’t even get the Republican votes necessary to pass the Senate. But according to Senate procedure, they have to be dealt with if enough senators force them onto the floor. They must be debated and voted upon ahead of other Senate business if brought up for consideration. This means that Democrats can tie up the Senate floor for upwards of ten hours with any single CRA resolution.

Democrats could go back in time to invalidate prior agency actions.

The deregulatory Trump administration isn’t writing a whole lot of rules, limiting the raw material for these kinds of votes. But the Republican vote on EPA waivers just widely expanded the options for a CRA resolution. If the Department of Health and Human Services grants a state waiver for changes to its Medicaid program, or if the U.S. Department of Agriculture does the same for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Democrats could write resolutions to overturn such waivers. If the Federal Communications Commission issues a broadcast license, or the Justice Department approves a merger, or if the Securities and Exchange Commission decides to defer a prosecution in an investor protection case, Senate Democrats could challenge it. If the Department of Defense inks a contract for a new weapons system or any other item for procurement, they could challenge that, too. Any decision to redirect funds, change the terms of grants, or make practically any decision at all could, under the theory just enshrined into the Senate rulebook by Republicans, lead to a CRA resolution and ten hours of debate.

Democrats could also go back in time to invalidate prior agency actions. The structure of the CRA is that the 60-legislative-day clock for disapproving of a rule starts only when it is submitted to Congress. Waivers haven’t typically been submitted under CRA procedures, because they weren’t considered rules. (This is why the EPA waivers were available for a vote, despite the 60-day legislative clock expiring on May 8.) So there are all kinds of other waivers and agency decisions that never got sent to Congress, and therefore could be put up for a CRA resolution.

The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress.

That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That’s the level of hardball that can be played here.

You don’t even have to introduce 1,000 CRA resolutions. Just a handful deployed at strategic moments would get the point across. And the prospect of more could be used by Democrats as leverage to get legislative changes or prevent other legislative harms, particularly in the budget mega-bill.

Importantly, Senate Democrats already know this. In a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) before the EPA waiver vote, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and several others made this very point: “If the current Senate Majority were to open this door, the CRA could be weaponized to retroactively invalidate decades of agency actions, and effectively hijack the Senate floor.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) underscored this after the Senate vote, saying that when Democrats regain control of the Senate, “every agency action that Democrats don’t like—whether it’s a rule or not—will be fair game, from mining permits and fossil fuel projects to foreign affairs and tax policies.” But he’s wrong that Democrats have to wait. As they need the support of only 30 senators, they can force these votes from the minority.

In those ten-hour debates such actions would force, Senate Republicans should be put on the record on whether they agree with Trump’s restructuring of the federal government. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decides to change the vaccination schedules recommended for children, Senate Republicans should have to go on the record about whether they agree. Republicans have escaped accountability for these kinds of harmful activities, and by forcing the Senate to weigh such actions, Democrats wouldn’t have to continue to let them off the hook.

I asked Phillips on Monday whether he had gotten any feedback from Democrats in Washington about his idea. He hadn’t. But we know they’re aware of it; they have said it out loud. They could start the campaign any day now.

The sanctity of Senate procedure doesn’t mean much to me. Using a majority vote for killing the EPA waivers certainly erodes the minority veto that is the filibuster. But I’m fine with a Senate majority having more power than the parliamentarian; that’s far more accountable than our current, disjointed reality, and ultimately will be good for Democrats when they return to full control of the government.

The likely outcome of weaponizing the Republican decision and twisting Senate procedure to make the chamber nonfunctional is that it would compel some détente to step away from mutually assured destruction. That would be a better situation than the “filibuster everything” mentality we have today.

And given the high stakes of the budget bill—soaring inequality as benefits for the poor are slashed to finance tax cuts for the rich—every tool at Senate Democrats’ disposal should be employed. Republicans just handed them a big one.