Senate Republicans took the first step toward approving a blueprint that unlocks President Donald Trump’s agenda on Thursday evening with a test vote that cleared the upper chamber with near-universal GOP support.
A majority of Republicans voted to start debate on the budget resolution, which green-lights Trump’s tax, border, and energy priorities, clearing the way for a marathon voting session and, ultimately, final adoption later this weekend.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) had been hoping to schedule the vote earlier on Thursday but spent the day in talks with multiple Republican holdouts.
One day earlier, Trump helped lock down a handful of fiscal hawks who wanted assurances that the White House was serious about offsetting the price tag of his agenda, expected to cost trillions of dollars.
Other Republicans still had concerns about what those cuts meant, however, for Medicaid, a welfare program likely to be rolled back as part of the budget process. The blueprint preserves language instructing the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has purview over Medicaid, to find $880 billion in offsets, while the Senate text commits to protecting the program, except for “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Ultimately, the budget resolution cleared the procedural vote 52-48, starting the stopwatch on 50 hours of debate evenly divided between each party. Once that time expires, the Senate will proceed to a “vote-a-rama” that allows senators to force an unlimited number of amendment votes.
The Democrats forced a barrage of votes across more than 10 hours in February, when Republicans brought an earlier version of their blueprint to the Senate floor.
This time, the vote-a-rama could begin Friday night if Republicans forgo much of their debate time, with final adoption sometime on Saturday morning.
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Thune is weighing whether to keep the Senate in session for the remainder of the weekend to process more nominations and conduct other floor business, according to a source familiar with the deliberations. The Senate would then adjourn early next week for the Easter recess.
House adoption of the blueprint, meanwhile, could come as soon as next week as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tries to tamp down an unrelated dispute over proxy voting.
