By Richard Cowan and Bo Erickson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate on Friday was set to start a marathon session aimed at eventually handing Republican President Donald Trump sweeping legislation to extend tax cuts and achieve budget reductions in the face of staunch Democratic opposition.
Late on Thursday, the Senate narrowly voted to open debate on a budget blueprint for the fiscal year beginning on October 1. The 52-48 vote was needed to unlock a fast-track procedure for pole-vaulting the costly tax cuts over blockades that Democrats normally could erect in opposition to the legislation.
Republicans have been struggling with worries about whether they can approve enough spending cuts to offset what some outside experts see as a multi-trillion-dollar price tag on their tax cuts.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune succeeded in keeping nearly all of his 52 Republican colleagues in line – only Senator Rand Paul voted no – in order to begin the debate.
However, it could take months for the Senate and House of Representatives to get to the point of actually voting on legislation that would enact the tax cuts, which some estimate could add around $5 trillion over 10 years to a national debt that already is more than $36.6 trillion.
Trump is pushing hard for Republicans, who narrowly control both chambers of Congress, to hand him what he calls “one big beautiful bill” that also would pay for additional resources for securing the southwestern U.S. border with Mexico and to deport immigrants.
Democrats were expected to offer scores of amendments, all or nearly all of which Republicans will likely rebuff, that deal with stopping cuts to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households and the disabled, as well as ones dealing with veterans, Social Security retirement benefits and trade tariffs imposed unilaterally by Trump that have put financial markets into a tailspin.
The debate in what is known as a “vote-a-rama” could stretch into Saturday.
“Democrats will expose the dark corners of the Republican plan,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in his opening arguments. “We will lay the case for how Republicans will plan to destroy Medicaid as we know it.”
The House of Representatives’ budget outline calls for $880 billion in Medicaid cuts, which Republicans claim can be achieved without cutting benefits but by rooting out what they see as waste, fraud and abuse that they have not yet detailed.
But Democrats were not the only obstacle that Thune will have to navigate.
Senator Susan Collins and potentially a handful of other Republicans have expressed reservations with different aspects of the legislation.
Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters late on Thursday that leadership was fielding concerns about how the Senate’s parliamentarian would enforce rules for this complicated, months-long process. That has spurred Republican discussions of circumventing the parliamentarian in order to gain a more favorable cost estimate for the whole process.
At stake is whether Republicans can claim to minimize the costs of their legislation.
“I will just speak for myself and say that I would never vote to overturn the parliamentarian,” said Senator Susan Collins.
Thune told reporters that he would not have moved forward with the legislation on the Senate floor “if we didn’t think we were clearly following the law.”
Another concerned lawmaker was Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who said he voted to proceed after he spoke with Trump on Thursday evening on potential Medicaid benefit cuts.
“The president said to me tonight that the House will not cut Medicaid benefits, the Senate will not cut Medicaid benefits, and ‘I won’t sign something with Medicaid benefit cuts in it,'” Hawley recounted, saying Trump’s assurance was “completely unequivocal” and a “red line.”
Senator Rand Paul, the only Republican who voted against proceeding, questioned his party’s path to more spending.
“It’s always been the conservative position not to add debt; not to add extraordinary amounts,” Paul said in an interview. “This may well be a record amount of debt. I’m not sure we’ve ever voted for $5 trillion in debt.”
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Bo Erickson; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
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