The move could delay Senate Republicans’ push for vote-a-rama as the GOP braces for a tight 50–50 split on a procedural vote on the Trump-backed bill.

Senate Democrats are preparing to force the full reading of the nearly 1,000-page Republican tax and spending package on the Senate floor, a move that could delay consideration of the Trump-endorsed bill by at least half a day.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) confirmed to The Epoch Times on June 28 that Democrats intend to invoke their right to demand that clerks read aloud the entire legislative text of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act if Republicans secure a vote to proceed to debate.

The procedural gambit threatens to temporarily slow Republican momentum, just as Senate GOP leaders were hoping to move swiftly into a marathon amendment session, known as a vote-a-rama, after a procedural vote clearing the way for floor debate.

The Democratic plan to force a reading of the bill came as Republicans were busy whipping up support for the legislation, bracing for what increasingly appeared likely to be a razor-thin 50–50 vote on the motion to proceed—one that would require Vice President JD Vance to break the tie.

GOP leaders spent Saturday working to secure backing from key holdouts, even as several senators made their positions clearer. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) each signaled they would support advancing the bill, citing last-minute changes unveiled Friday that addressed some of their earlier concerns.

Collins said she was prepared to vote to proceed out of deference to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) but emphasized she still has serious reservations and plans to offer amendments to reshape parts of the legislation.

Hawley, who had previously raised alarms about potential Medicaid cuts, said he would back both the procedural motion and the bill itself after securing a delay in changes to the federal cap on Medicaid provider taxes—a shift he said would mean higher federal Medicaid funding for Missouri in the coming years.

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) also announced Saturday that he would vote yes on the motion to proceed, after receiving assurances from Republican leaders that Section 50301—a provision calling for the sale of certain federal lands—would either be stripped out via floor amendment or removed by the Senate parliamentarian under the Byrd Rule if deemed out of order under reconciliation.

Meanwhile, other Republicans remained opposed. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have all indicated they would vote against the bill—whether on the procedural motion or on final passage. Paul objected to the inclusion of a $5 trillion increase in the federal debt limit, while Johnson argued the measure does not go far enough to reduce the deficit. Tillis has expressed broader concerns with the scope and substance of the legislation.

The uncertainty left Republicans in a precarious position, scrambling to secure the final votes needed to push President Donald Trump’s economic and tax agenda closer to the finish line.

Trump, during an event at the White House on June 26, highlighted the tax cuts and immigration funding efforts included in the bill, describing it as “one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of our country.”

The legislative package will “secure our borders, turbocharge our economy, and bring back the American dream,” the president said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier that day that Trump expects the bill to reach his desk by July 4, and Thune has set the same deadline for the Senate to pass it.

The bill, spanning nearly 1,000 pages, aims to make permanent parts of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while introducing new tax breaks, including exempting up to $25,000 in tip income for workers earning under $150,000. It would also raise the cap on state and local tax deductions from $10,000 to $40,000 through 2029, with limits for higher earners.

The legislation proposes rolling back clean energy incentives, ending tax credits for electric vehicles after September 2025, and curtailing benefits for wind, solar, and hydrogen projects. It also introduces a new tax break for interest on loans for U.S.-built vehicles and eliminates fines for automakers failing to meet certain fuel economy standards.

Other provisions include $25 billion in funding for rural hospitals, a gradual reduction in the cap on Medicaid provider taxes, and the removal of a $200 tax stamp required for purchasing firearm silencers and short-barrel rifles.

Budget analysts estimate the measure could add between $3.5 trillion and $4.5 trillion to federal borrowing over the next decade, depending on final negotiations over tax cuts and spending levels.

Jacob Burg contributed to this report.

The Senate’s version of the “big, beautiful bill” is facing serious headwinds in the House with The Hill learning that at least six House Republicans are currently a “no” on the framework, a daunting sign for GOP leadership as the Senate races towards a vote.

Those six House Republicans, some of whom requested anonymity, are enough opposition to tank the package, as GOP leaders grapple with a razor-thin majority. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who was one of two GOP lawmakers to oppose the House version of the bill last month, is also likely to oppose the Senate’s edition, deepening the pocket of resistance in the lower chamber.

Republicans can only afford to lose three votes and still clear the legislation, assuming full attendance and united Democratic opposition.

“I support the reasonable provisions in H.R. 1 that protect Medicaid’s long-term viability and ensure the program continues to serve our most vulnerable, but I will not support a final bill that eliminates vital funding streams our hospitals rely on, including provider taxes and state directed payments, or any provisions that punish expansion states,” Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) wrote in a statement on Saturday.

“President Trump was clear when he said to root out our waste, fraud, and abuse without cutting Medicaid and I wholeheartedly agree,” he continued. “I urge my Senate colleagues to stick to the Medicaid provisions in H.R. 1 — otherwise I will vote no.”

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) told The Hill that he is also opposed to the bill because of the Medicaid provider tax provision. Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) is currently a “no” on the measure because of the Medicaid language, rollback of solar energy credits and public lands provisions, a source familiar with the matter told The Hill.

Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), meanwhile, told The Hill that he is against the current version of the package because of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap proposal. The legislation would increase the currently $10,000 SALT cap to $40,000 for individuals making $500,000 or less for five years, then snap back to the original number.

“While I support the President’s broader agenda, how could I support the same unfair $10k SALT cap I’ve spent years criticizing?” LaLota said. “A permanent $40k deduction cap with income thresholds of $225k for single filers and $450k for joint filers would earn my vote.”

It is not, however, just moderates who are signaling issues with the Senate bill: Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, posted an ominous message on X that suggested he was not pleased with the package.

“I will not negotiate via X. But it’s important to know that jamming us with a bill before we’ve had any chance to review the implications of major changes & re-writes, fluid scores, a high likelihood of violating the house framework (deficits) , & tons of swamp buy-offs is bad,” he wrote.

The opposition is rising to the surface as Senate Republicans inch closer to holding an initial vote on the “big, beautiful bill,” which would officially kick off the consideration process and eventually tee up a final vote in the House. It remains unclear, however, if Senate GOP leaders have the votes to move forward.

If the motion to proceed passes by a simple majority, the chamber would hold a series of unlimited amendment votes called a vote-a-rama, which could result in changes to the measure. Senate GOP leaders are also still talking to holdouts and could make changes to the bill as written.

In the meantime, House Republicans — beginning to review the revised Senate text unveiled overnight — are expressing resistance to the measure, prompting serious questions about whether top GOP lawmakers will be able to enact the legislation by their self-imposed July 4 deadline.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) convened a call with the House Republican Conference Saturday afternoon and urged lawmakers to keep their concerns with the Senate bill private, and instead speak directly with their senators and the White House, two sources told The Hill.

Senate Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told members that it is unlikely they will have to return to Washington on Monday, the sources said. Tuesday or Wednesday is more realistic, he told lawmakers.

One source told The Hill that the call was brief and leadership did not take questions.

The main qualm among House Republicans appears to be the Medicaid language in the bill. The Senate’s legislation includes a proposal that would effectively cap provider taxes at 3.5 percent by 2031, down from the current 6 percent, but only for the states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The decrease was initially supposed to begin in 2027, with a 0.5 percent phase down annually, but Senate Republicans overnight changed the text to delay the implementation to 2028. The upper chamber also inserted a provision to create a $25 billion rural hospital relief fund that would be distributed over five years to assuage those concerns.

The changes, however, do not seem to be solving all of the GOP’s problems, with House Republicans still voicing opposition to the language.

Aside from Medicaid, the Senate bill’s rollback of green-energy tax credits is an issue for some House Republicans. The revised legislation for the upper chamber slashes tax incentives for wind and solar energy and adds a new tax on future wind and solar projects.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) would not say how he plans to vote on the bill, but signaled that he is not happy with the Medicaid provisions and green-energy tax credit language.

“Instead of improving the Medicaid and energy portions of [the] House bill it appears the Senate went backwards,” he told The Hill.

Three Democratic senators unveiled a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system Monday, just more than a month after President-elect Trump stunned the Democrats by sweeping all seven battleground states, knocking off three Senate Democratic incumbents in the process.

Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii,) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), three leading progressive Senate voices, say it’s time to “restore democracy” by allowing for the direct election of presidents through the popular vote alone.

The senators are troubled that the Electoral College has twice elected a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in the past 19 years. In both those instances, a Republican captured the White House — George W. Bush in the 2000 election and Trump in the 2016 election.

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“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” Schatz said. “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.”

To be sure, Trump would have still won the 2024 election if it had been decided by popular vote.

He collected 77,300,739 votes compared to Vice President Harris’s 75,014,534.

But many Democrats think that they would have had a better chance to beat Trump if they had a reason to focus on running up the margin of Harris’s victory in populous Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York.

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Republicans, however, also have big, populous states squarely in their column, namely Florida and Texas.

Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued that the Electoral College “disenfranchises millions of Americans.”

“In 2000, before the general election, I introduced a bipartisan resolution to amend the Constitution and abolish the electoral college. I still believe today that it’s time to retire this 18th century invention,” he said.

Democrats are worried that it has become increasingly difficult to win on the presidential ticket in battleground states while advocating for the progressive agenda that candidates need to embrace in the primary to appeal to the party’s base.

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“It’s always worth reminding people: It’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states, OK?” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’s presidential campaign, told Crooked Media’s “Pod Save America” last month.

“Let’s look at Pennsylvania: 25 percent of the electorate is liberal, roughly, 34 percent is conservative,” Plouffe explained. “So in every battleground state, there’s more conservatives than liberals.”

Democrats felt all the more demoralized by Harris’s loss because she dramatically outspent Trump, raising $1 billion for her campaign while a super PAC supporting her, Future Forward, raised nearly another $1 billion.

Harris lost in all seven of the presidential battleground states, including the three states that made up the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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Welch called the Electoral College “outdated and flawed.”

“Our democracy is at its strongest when everyone’s voice is heard — and right now our elections aren’t as representative as they should be because of the outdated and flawed electoral college. I’m excited to partner with my friends and colleagues Senator Schatz and Chair Durbin on this important constitutional amendment, which will help empower every voter in every state,” he said.

Former first lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for abolishing the Electoral College after she won the popular vote but lost the vote of the Electoral College in the 2016 presidential election.

“I think it needs to be eliminated,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2017. “I’d like to see us move beyond it, yes.”

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Pinned

Senator Chuck Schumer warned on Thursday that if the government closed, President Trump and Republicans would have no incentive to reopen it,

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, broke with his party on Thursday and lined up enough Democrats to advance a Republican-written bill to keep federal funding flowing past a midnight Friday deadline, arguing that Democrats could not allow a government shutdown that many of them have demanded.

During a private luncheon with Democrats, Mr. Schumer stunned many of his colleagues by announcing that he planned to vote to allow the G.O.P. bill to move forward, and indicated that he had enough votes to help Republicans break any filibuster by his own party against the measure, according to attendees and people familiar with the discussion.

It was a turnabout from just a day earlier, when Mr. Schumer proclaimed that Democrats were “unified” against the legislation, and a remarkable move at a time when many of the party’s members in both chambers and progressive activists have been agitating vocally for senators to block it in defiance of President Trump.

In a speech hours later on the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer announced his plan to vote to move forward with the Republican measure, which would fund the government through Sept. 30. He argued that if Democrats stood in the way, it would lead to a shutdown that would only further empower Mr. Trump and Elon Musk in their bid to defund and dismantle federal programs.

“The Republican bill is a terrible option,” Mr. Schumer said in his evening speech. “It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address far too many of this country’s needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

In a shutdown, Mr. Schumer said, “the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise that they would ever be rehired.”

He also warned that if the government closed, Mr. Trump and Republicans would have no incentive to reopen it, since they could selectively fund “their favorite departments and agencies, while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.”

His announcement came little more than 24 hours before a shutdown deadline. If Congress fails to approve legislation extending federal funding, it will lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.

In a meeting with reporters after his remarks, Mr. Schumer declined to confirm that he had sufficient Democratic votes to move the legislation past procedural hurdles, saying that senators were making their own decisions. But other Democrats said they were confident that he had the backing to push the measure forward.

Senate Republicans are expected to need the support of at least eight Democrats to steer around a filibuster. Other than Mr. Schumer, only one Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, has said he will support the bill.

Mr. Schumer has long seen responsibility for government shutdowns as a political albatross. But many Democrats on Capitol Hill have refused to go along with the stopgap spending measure, regarding it as their only leverage against Mr. Trump. All but one House Democrat voted against the plan on Tuesday, and many of them, along with their colleagues in the Senate, have spent the last few days pressing to hold firm against it to challenge the president.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said on CNN that it would be a “mistake” for Mr. Schumer not to block the bill.

“I hope that individuals that are considering that reconsider it,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “I genuinely do. I don’t think it’s what New Yorkers want.”

In lengthy closed-door group discussions over the past three days, Senate Democrats have agonized over how to handle the spending bill, which would keep government funding largely flat over the next six months.

Many of them described an impossible choice between two evils: supporting a bill that would give the Trump administration wide latitude to continue its unilateral efforts to slash government employees and programs, or a shutdown that would also give Mr. Trump and his team broad leeway to decide what to fund.

Image Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said it would not be a normal shutdown. Credit… Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Several Democrats — including both centrists and progressives — declared that they could not back legislation that would give that kind of power to the president and Mr. Musk. They groused that Republicans had unilaterally drafted the legislation and refused to consider any changes to win their votes, essentially daring them to take the blame for a politically toxic shutdown.

“What everyone is wrestling with is that either outcome is terrible,” said Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. “This president has put us in a position where, in either direction, lots of people’s constituents are going to get hurt and hurt badly. So people are wrestling with what is the least worst outcome.”

Thursday’s session was particularly emotional, stretching on for two hours and at times growing heated. At one point, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York could be heard through closed doors shouting, “This will not be a normal shutdown!”

Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who had widely been seen as one of the Democrats who might be willing to join Republicans to overcome a filibuster, announced that he would oppose the measure, adding that his decision was the most difficult call he had made since he was elected five years ago.

“That is a calculation I’ve been struggling with for days — weeks, in fact,” he said. “It’s a tough call, and that’s why we spent a lot of time talking. That’s one of the challenging things on either path: There’s a lot of unknowns out there.”

Image Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, center, said that it was a “tough call” but that he would oppose the measure. Credit… Eric Lee/The New York Times

But he added that Mr. Musk “had been wreaking havoc on our government,” and said that the Republican-written bill, drafted in consultation with the White House, “is designed to give him more influence, more power.”

“This is not the way we should be funding the government,” Mr. Kelly said.

Republicans sought to escalate the pressure on Democrats to relent and end the spending fight, and warned on Thursday that the moment for making a decision was at hand.

“As the expression goes, it’s time for Democrats to fish or cut bait,” said Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader. “Democrats need to decide if they’re going to support funding legislation that came over from the House or if they’re going to shut down the government. So far it looks like they plan to shut it down.”

At the same time, residents of the District of Columbia were protesting on Capitol Hill to demand that Senate Democrats block a spending bill that would amount to a $1 billion budget cut for the District over the next six months. Crowds of school-age children carried signs made with crayons and colored markers, one of which read, “You cut my dad’s job and now you want to cut my school,” punctuated by four sad faces.

Some Democrats said they were still trying to assess whether the best approach to reining in Mr. Trump was defeating the spending plan or allowing it to become law.

“We are intent on stymying and stopping the slide toward Trump’s tyrannical and autocratic power, which is happening in real time and inflicting harm on real people,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who said he would vote to block the spending bill. “I’m respectful of my colleagues who have a different opinion with the same goal, which is to prevent unchecked and unbridled dictatorial power for President Trump and Elon Musk.”