Consider This from NPR - House Speaker may have to make a lot of promises to get bill to Trump's desk

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

The massive tax and spending bill central to President Trump's agenda is one step closer to reality.After weeks of negotiations and 49 consecutive votes that started Monday morning, the senate approved President Trump's signature domestic policy bill around lunch time Tuesday. It now goes back to the House of Representatives where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson will have to reconcile the senate changes with his members' competing priorities.Michael Ricci has had a long career in republican politics, including working as Speaker Paul Ryan's communications director and Speaker John Boehner's Chief Speech writer. We talked with him about the stakes, and the bill's prospects in the House.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The tax and spending legislation critical to President Trump's agenda has already made history. After weeks of negotiations among Republicans, it has finally passed the Senate following a record setting number of votes starting Monday morning. Calendar number 107, HR1, an act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to Title 2 of HCONRES 14. Voting dragged into a grueling all-nighter as Republicans attempted to shore up support among their ranks. GOP leaders darted in and out of offices, trying to balance the demands of senators

who thought the bill's cuts were too deep with those who thought they didn't go far enough. And their slim Senate majority meant they could only afford to lose three votes. And, as it turned out, their efforts were just enough. Ms. Collins. Mr. Paul. Mr. Tillis. Maine's Susan Collins, Kentucky's Rand Paul, and North Carolina's Tom Tillis broke ranks and opposed the bill, tying the vote after all Democrats voted no. At that point, the

bill's fate rested in the hands of Vice President J.D. Vance, who took his seat at the front of the chamber mid-vote. On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 50, the Senate being evenly divided, the Vice President votes, and the affirmative, the bill as amended, is passed. President Trump, who had asked lawmakers to get the legislation to his desk by July 4th, welcomed the news, calling it music to my ears. Consider this. After long and contentious debate, the Senate has finally passed President Trump's massive

tax and spending bill. Its fate now lies in the House, where Republicans also hold a wafer-thin majority. From NPR, I'm Juana Sommers. It's Consider This from NPR. The massive tax and spending bill central to President Trump's agenda is one step closer to reality. After weeks of negotiations and 49 consecutive votes that started Monday morning,

the Senate approved President Trump's signature domestic policy bill around lunchtime today. It now goes back to the House of Representatives where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson will have to reconcile the Senate changes with his members' competing priorities. And that's why we're going to bring in Michael Ricci. He's had a long career in Republican politics, including working as speaker,

Paul Ryan's deputy communications director and speaker, John Boehner's chief speechwriter. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, Juana. Mike, just start if you can by giving us your immediate reaction to the passage of this bill in the Senate today. It took longer than I expected.

The Senate usually doesn't show us as much of the sausage making as the House does. the passage of this bill in the Senate today? It took longer than I expected. The Senate usually doesn't show us as much of the sausage making as the House does. Even their votoramas are usually happening overnight and we all wake up in the morning and they're done. So to see this happen in the light of day, I'm sure it took longer than Leader Thune expected but that's when you have tight margins like this, that's what happens. But, you know, here we are on the verge of meeting President Trump's July 4th deadline. And Majority Leader John Thune, as you mentioned, he had to make a lot of deals to bring along the nose in his party, even making concessions to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski around SNAP benefits for people in her state. I know that most of your experience when we've talked before is in the House.

But I wonder, have you seen a deal come together quite like this before? Yeah, I mean, the more people are texting each other and reading the bill, you know, it's a bill that it's got a lot, you're gonna have a lot of conservative members in the House who are gonna say, you know, I'm loyal to the president, I do whatever he needs,

and you know, you have this moderate senator who basically was able to pack this bill with, you know, tax breaks for whalers and things like that. needs and you have this moderate senator who basically was able to pack this bill with tax breaks for whalers and things like that. And so I think the longer this bill is out there, the more people are going to discover that and you may remember how much that hurt the initial political image of Obamacare, how many deals were made at the end for Democrats. So I think House conservatives, the more they learn about the deals that Senator Murkowski

was able to make, it's only going to add to the frustration. But I do believe that she was genuinely torn. And with losing Senator Tillis' vote over the weekend, it did give her her leverage to get as much as she could. Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the Senate bill would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. So how is House Speaker Mike Johnson going to be able to make the case to get his caucus behind this bill, particularly those fiscal hawks? I mean, the Freedom Caucus has warned that this bill violates a budget framework

already endorsed by more than 30 House Republicans. Yeah, there was a right there was a fiscal framework that about 30 or 37 House Republicans had said they needed to see the bill align with speaker did promise that he would make sure the bill did that. It's a time honored tradition for speakers to go to the members and say, look, the Senate changed this on me. There's nothing I can do at this point. We've gotten the best deal we can.

We can either, you know, go to conference and risk blowing the president's deadline or we'll just, you know, take this and he'll probably start to make, you know, one of this is when speakers start to make a lot of promises. I'm sure we're going to hear in the next 24 hours about fiscal commissions, new Doge efforts, more promises to cut spending. He's going to have to promise a lot to get over the finish line. But no matter how you cut it, you know, there's a lot to get over the finish line, but no matter how you cut it, there's a lot they try to, the White House tries to put its own studies out there, its own analyses out there, but there's no question the bill is not going to help as

much as the fiscal hawks were hoping for. And then on the other side, there are the cuts to Medicaid where early estimates suggest that nearly 12 million people could lose their healthcare coverage under the bill and many moderates and some conservatives in the House have warned that they cannot support the cuts in the bill. Did the Senate changes to your mind do anything to address that? So the Senate went more conservative on Medicaid than I think a lot of the than the House expected. And I think, you know, on paper, Republicans are looking at polling saying that, you know,

trying to take undocumented immigrants off the rolls is good. You know, work requirements make sense. Waste, fraud, and abuse is common sense as well to cut. But, you know, as you know, Medicaid is tied up in rural hospitals, long-term care for seniors. I mean, a lot of governors, including probably some Republican governors over time, who have concerns about these provisions.

It'd be interesting to hear what House members are hearing from hospitals, from governors, from rural areas over the next 24 hours. But at this point, again, you know, maybe they'll promise a second reconciliation bill to fix some of that. But a lot of this seems baked in the cake at this point, unfortunately. Going back to that fact on the Medicaid that millions could lose their coverage with this bill, how big of a risk is this politically for congressional Republicans, many of whom will be starting reelection campaigns this time next year?

They tried to delay all this so that it doesn't hit next year. So I think the burden would be a lot on these blue state governors in particular to try to make this about affordability and cost of living. If they can tie it to that, the way we just saw affordability and cost of living be a big issue last week in New York, I think that will be the test of whether it's a defining issue in the election. We'll leave it there. That's Mike Ricci who served in many positions for many Republicans in leadership. He's now a partner at Seven Letter and a professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Juana.

This episode was produced by Elena Burnett and Brianna Scott with audio engineering by Tiffany Vera Castro. It was edited by Courtney Dornig and Sarah Handel. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.