​Senate Republican leaders spent the afternoon Saturday struggling to get their conference lined up behind a procedural motion to bring the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill to the floor for debate, with a number of holdouts expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts, land sales and more.

An expected 4 p.m. vote on the motion to proceed, which requires a simple majority, soon gave way to undetermined timing as GOP leaders awaited updates from the Congressional Budget Office on their revised bill’s budgetary impact, including potential changes that were still being written. A Republican aide said some senators didn’t want to vote to proceed to the measure until they had a better sense of how much it would cost.

Republicans also were waiting on the arrival of Vice President JD Vance, whose vote would almost certainly be needed to break a tie. Three other GOP senators were also needed back at the Capitol: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Eric Schmitt of Missouri. They’d spent the afternoon golfing with President Donald Trump. 

Still, Paul wasn’t likely to vote for the motion to proceed to a bill he finds just as ugly as the Democrats do, in his case due to its $5 trillion debt limit boost and lack of deep enough spending cuts.

With the Democratic caucus bitterly opposed to the measure, they announced plans to insist that the entire 940-page substitute amendment be read aloud on the floor — a process that was estimated to take up to 15 hours. “Republicans won’t tell America what’s in the bill so Democrats are forcing it to be read start to finish on the floor,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote on the social platform X. “We will be here all night if that’s what it takes to read it.”

After the reading, the Senate would allow for as much as 20 hours of floor debate, although Republicans could give back some of the 10 hours allotted to them to speed up the process.

If that schedule holds, passage may not occur until Monday. 

After all the debate, senators could begin taking up an unlimited number of amendments in a marathon session known as a vote-a-rama that has often been an all-night affair. There will likely be budget points of order that will take up time as well, challenging certain items under the Byrd rule that restricts what can be included.

Unruly majority

With Republicans still divided over the bill, which contains most of Trump’s legislative agenda, the outcome of the procedural vote was hardly a certainty.

Fiscal hawks had threatened to block it to win concessions of deeper spending cuts, while others expressed qualms about the size of Medicaid cuts that estimates show could cut millions of Americans off their health insurance.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who faces a difficult reelection next year in a swing state, said he would vote against taking up the bill Saturday after voicing concerns about potentially more than $30 billion in Medicaid cuts affecting his state.

“I did my homework on behalf of North Carolinians, and I cannot support this bill in its current form,” Tillis said in a statement. “It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”

But Republicans made some Medicaid tweaks to the bill text, released around midnight, that brought at least one opponent on board.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who spent weeks railing against Medicaid cuts, said Saturday he would vote for the motion to proceed to the bill and for passage of the bill. He said a delay in cuts to state taxes levied on health providers and the creation of a new $25 billion fund for rural hospitals would mean extra Medicaid dollars for Missouri in the short term.

“I’m going to spend the next however long trying to make sure that the cuts that we have successfully delayed never take place,” Hawley said in announcing his support for the bill that would make those cuts possible. “I think it is a huge mistake. I think that this has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid. And I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul searching.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is seeking a $100 billion hospital fund and suggested she would seek amendments to the bill, said she was nevertheless prepared to let the bill go to the floor. While she would respect the decision of the majority leader to bring the package up for debate, she said, “that does not mean in any way that I’m satisfied with the provisions in this bill.”

Expansive agenda

The filibuster-proof package, which Democrats have rallied against, would extend the expiring tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017, while offering new tax breaks on tips and overtime pay.

It would provide about $300 billion in new money for the military and for immigration and border enforcement, while making deep cuts to the social safety net, including Medicaid and food stamps, that could amount to more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years, though there is no official cost estimate of the bill yet.

Independent scorekeepers have found the bill would add trillions of dollars to deficits over the coming decade, while the Trump administration insists that it would actually reduce deficits because of economic growth. The measure also would increase the nation’s $36.1 trillion debt limit by $5 trillion — enough to get past next year’s midterm elections.

Fiscal hawks have decried the bill for inadequate spending cuts that they say would do little to stem the tide of rising deficits already baked into budget projections. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., had vowed to block the bill on those grounds and claimed to be in an alliance with Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida.

Land sale objections

Still another obstacle was a provision by Lee to sell federal land in an effort to spur more affordable housing. But a resolution to that matter appeared to be baked in — a floor amendment to strike the language, led by Montana GOP Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy.

Sheehy earlier Saturday had threatened to vote against the motion to proceed, but in a statement later in the day he said he was on board after “productive discussions with leadership” on offering an amendment to strip Lee’s provision.

Lee watered down the language significantly in his latest draft, exempting all Forest Service land and significantly narrowing the scope of Bureau of Land Management acreage that would be subject to sale. But not only were there still potential Byrd rule and scoring issues with that language, Lee was facing significant opposition within his own caucus.

“It’s unfortunate because we’ve made a lot changes, changes that would accommodate most, if not all, of the concerned people,” Lee said Saturday.

Earlier in the day, senators openly admitted the bill was still a work in progress, including the centerpiece of the plan — the $4 trillion tax package.

Senate Finance Chairman Michael D. Crapo, R-Idaho, made numerous changes, large and small, to the earlier draft which were included in the substitute amendment unveiled just before midnight Friday. But that wasn’t the final word, with more tweaks forthcoming.

“What you saw is final as of last night,” Crapo quipped to reporters Saturday.

More tweaks were being readied for the “vote-a-rama” process that will ensue after all time for debate has expired, where the bill could be essentially rewritten on the fly before passage.

“I think it could be very interesting on the floor. I think this will not be your typical vote-a-rama, from what I hear,” Hawley said.

Shuttle move

Many of the substitute amendment’s tweaks to the expansive proposal were arcane changes designed to get around Byrd rule objections.

For example, Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, clarified a controversial artificial intelligence provision in his panel’s title of the bill.

Previously, an opt-in program that would enable states to access federal subsidies for AI deployment projects looked like it might have also restricted access to an earlier $42 billion broadband subsidy program. After Democrats cried foul, Cruz wrote in language clarifying that only the bill’s $500 million addition for AI subsidies would be affected.

Cruz also made his third, and possibly final, attempt to shoehorn in language to direct the transfer of the space shuttle Discovery display from a Virginia museum to a facility near Houston’s Johnson Space Center. 

Instead of naming a “non-profit facility not more than 5 miles” from the NASA “field center” that would be selected to receive the Discovery, now the language simply says the shuttle would be placed on display at an “entity within the Metropolitan Statistical Area where such center is located.”

Sandhya Raman, Lia DeGroot, Aidan Quigley and Peter Cohn contributed to this report. ​