Republicans Remove Military Spending And Tax Policy To Avoid Senate Rule Violations

House Republicans just rewired Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful bill to keep it alive in the Senate, ripping out several key provisions that had been flagged as rule violations.

The changes went through on Wednesday afternoon after a 213 to 207 vote, locking in a procedural maneuver that updated the bill automatically without needing a second full House vote. The only Republican to vote no was Thomas Massie, a lawmaker from Kentucky.

The maneuver was needed to protect the bill’s reconciliation status — that is, the special privilege that allows it to bypass the filibuster and pass the Senate with a simple majority. Without these tweaks, the bill would’ve lost that shield and been exposed to a 60-vote threshold it had no chance of clearing.

According to reporting from Politico, the stripped-down version is meant to preserve the package’s viability ahead of the Senate’s review.

Republicans remove military spending and tax policy to avoid Senate rule violations

Republicans deleted many big-ticket items that were originally in their House version. These included $2 billion for Pentagon military intelligence, over $500 million for missile development, and a policy to crack down on the employee retention tax credit, which had turned into a scam magnet during and after the pandemic. That last item alone was expected to generate more than $6 billion in offsets that were supposed to balance the bill’s other spending and tax cuts.

But none of that could survive the Senate parliamentarian’s review. If those policies stayed, the parliamentarian would’ve ruled the bill out of order under reconciliation rules. That would have made it vulnerable to a filibuster and likely dead on arrival. So Republican leadership acted fast to rip out those items before the bill even reached the Senate.

They aren’t done yet. The Senate parliamentarian is still going through the rest of the package, and more sections could get cut for breaking budget rules. That means more adjustments are coming — and fast — because Republicans are still aiming to pass the full bill by July 4.

Leadership plans more changes while Senate rewrites bill

Trump’s party wants to rewrite and reintroduce some of the policies that got pulled. But they’ll try doing it through the Senate version instead, hoping they can get the language right this time without losing the fast-track privilege. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are writing their version of the package now, and they’ve got less than a month to lock it in.

Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, told reporters, “We’ll see what they produce,” referring to the Senate’s work. “I just need them to come to their final decisions on everything. So we’ll see how it shapes up.”

Behind closed doors, aides in both chambers know the timeline is tight. Some say that even if the Senate moves quickly, it could still take weeks or even months to finalize if their version drifts too far from what the House passed. That’s a problem, because neither chamber wants to go through another pingpong fight — sending the bill back and forth for revisions.

The current plan is to settle all disputes during the Senate process. That way, once the Senate finishes, the House can vote again — once — to approve the final product and send it to Trump. But for that to work, they’ll need to agree ahead of time on some major sticking points: spending cuts, business tax extensions, and the SALT deduction cap.

“There’s just a lot of coordination to hopefully avoid some of the potential snafus that could happen with something that’s this complicated,” said John Thune, the Republican whip.

Work is already underway. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York, met with Senate GOP staff on Wednesday to talk about raising the SALT cap. Over in a separate meeting Tuesday night, Chip Roy from Texas and Scott Perry from Pennsylvania sat down with budget hawks like Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott to push for tighter spending limits and to keep the House’s cuts to clean energy tax credits in place.

Source: CryptoSlate