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Republicans in the House and Senate are anxiously watching whether President Donald Trump will take a more aggressive approach in corralling GOP lawmakers in favor of his “big, beautiful bill.”
“President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, isn’t he? I think it’s incumbent upon him to make sure everybody in the Senate understands that this is a signature piece of legislation that essentially 77 million Americans voted for,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital.
The Senate is working through a massive piece of legislation advancing Trump’s agenda on tax, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt — which the president has said he wants on his desk by the Fourth of July.
Trump has been pushing Republicans on the bill in public, addressing it at back-to-back events on Thursday and Friday while also posting on his Truth Social platform.
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Congressional leaders have said they’ve been in near-constant contact with Trump or his White House staff about the legislation. Indeed, numerous White House officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Vice President JD Vance, to push Senate Republicans to stay on course.
But some House Republicans want him to be as forceful as he was when their chamber passed the bill by just one vote in May. Trump summoned multiple groups of Republicans to the White House on several occasions in the lead-up to that vote, and even made a rare trip to Capitol Hill to gin up support within the House GOP.
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., told Fox News Digital that when the House was going through the motions of advancing the mammoth legislation, it “looked all but impossible” to get it across the finish line.
But it was because of Trump, he said, that the bill succeeded.
“He’s our closer in the bullpen right now,” he said. “His arm is getting warmed up, and we’ll bring him in here in the ninth inning, and he’s going to throw heat. And so far, he’s pitched a no-hitter.”
It’s worth noting that several senators who have expressed concerns about the bill have spoken individually with Trump.
But Republicans who spoke with Fox News Digital showed varying degrees of enthusiasm when asked whether the president should repeat the intense involvement he had in the House.
When asked by Fox News Digital whether it’s time for the president to get involved, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas., said, “That’s up to the White House. It’s up to the president.”
But Roy added, “I think the Senate needs to deliver, and I think the Senate ought to make good on the agreement that the majority leader had with us and with the speaker to work with us to achieve that level of spending cuts.”
Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Penn., said Trump is “always involved, so he’ll stay involved because we do want to get it done by July 4th.”
Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., said he was not being kept aware of how involved Trump was, but said the president’s deal-making skills would likely be needed.
“I mean, I think it’s gonna take that type of horsepower to kind of bring everybody together,” Fitzgerald said.
But some Republicans in the upper chamber are resistant.
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“It doesn’t matter what he says, of course not,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital. “I mean, I’m not voting for something unless I know what I’m voting on.”
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., wouldn’t say whether he believed that Trump should put a finger on the scales more. But he told Fox News Digital that he was appreciative of the effort that Thune and Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, had put into getting feedback from Senate Republicans, but said that at a certain point, lawmakers just needed to vote on the bill.
“We have cussed and discussed this bill for a long, long time, and at some point you move from careful, rational deliberation into the foothills of jackassery,” Kennedy said. “And that’s where we are now. It’s time to vote. If people are unhappy, they can offer amendments.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment.
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