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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is coordinating with his colleagues in the House to push back against Senate Republicans’ efforts to ram President Donald Trump’s wish list of policy desires through the Senate.
In a letter to Senate Democrats on Sunday, Schumer, D-N.Y., laid out a multipronged strategy to inflict as much pain on Republicans as possible in the budget reconciliation process, the legislative strategy the GOP is employing to sidestep negotiating with Democrats to advance the president’s priorities.
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While congressional Republicans don’t need Democrats to move the colossal bill to Trump’s desk, Schumer wants to make the process as uncomfortable as possible as Senate Republicans begin a roughly monthlong sprint to put their fingerprints on what Trump deemed a “big, beautiful bill.”
The top Senate Democrat is coordinating with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and the top Democrats on crucial House committees to “share firsthand insight from their process and key Republican fault lines” with their Senate counterparts.
“Based on Senate Republicans’ public comments, it’s clear that if this reckless reconciliation bill passes the Senate it is very likely to contain changes, forcing it to be sent back to the House of Representatives,” Schumer wrote. “That’s why we must be united with our House Democratic colleagues to fight this assault on working families.”
Indeed, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said much of the debate and subsequent tweaks to the bill would focus on finding deeper spending cuts. The House’s offering set a goal of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, but some Senate Republicans want to hit $2 trillion, while a smaller cohort of fiscal hawks want to go even deeper.
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Thune said that Republicans’ main focus during the next month would be ensuring that Trump’s first-term tax cuts are made permanent with the massive bill and not allowed to expire by the end of the year on the Senate floor, marking the Senate’s return on Monday.
“We are not going to let that happen, and our biggest focus this month is completing this tax relief legislation with the goal of getting the final bill to the president before the Fourth of July,” he said. “It’s going to be a very busy month, Mr. President.”
In all, 10 Senate committees will be tasked with sifting through the massive bill’s contents, which include the president’s policy desires on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt.
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Schumer’s edict comes as those committees gear up to make their own revisions to the bill to, in part, fall in line with their own policy and spending desires and to also comply with Senate rules.
He noted that Senate Democrats have been working “overtime” to target a litany of policies in the GOP’s plan that “are in clear violation of the reconciliation rules and, in some cases, an assault on our very democracy.”
Some Republicans already have issues with certain policies in the bill, like cuts to Medicaid or the plan to move up the timeline to phase out green energy tax credits ushered in by the Biden administration.
Schumer also prodded Democrats to continue aggressively denouncing the bill on the ground in their home states and districts, arguing that “if the American people truly knew how deeply devastating, damaging, and deceitful this Republican plan is, they will reject it.”
“Republicans’ ‘One Ugly Bill’ is a farce; an attack on the values that make America great,” he wrote. “We know the first four months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been catastrophic for the American people. It is our duty to fight for American families, to stop the damage, and make certain Republicans are held accountable.”
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