June 27, 2025
Republican leaders in the Senate are still bound and determined to give President Trump what he wants – that is, passage of a Senate Reconciliation bill that closely aligns with the House bill, by July 4. Senate leaders have not yet conceded the timeline they are working with; however, given recent developments it is increasingly unlikely the Senate will be finished by then. More on the timing below.
Summary: The Senate parliamentarian determined on Thursday that several provisions in the current Senate reconciliation proposal violate the “Byrd Rule.” This means that to comply with the rules that allow for a simple majority vote on the reconciliation bill, Senators would need to remove or adjust language. Senate leadership could overrule the parliamentarian’s finding, but Senate Majority Leader Thune has expressed in interviews his hesitancy to do so. Now, Senate Republicans are scrambling to amend the provisions called out by the parliamentarian. I have pasted an article (below) from the NY Times explaining that the Senate proposal to slash federal food assistance was caught up in the Senate parliamentary vetting process however the Senate has apparently amended the provision in such a way as to pass muster with the parliamentarian although I can find no independent confirmation of this – yet. The Senate parliamentarian still has a number of decisions to make on several provisions.
On Wednesday night I participated in a statewide town hall hosted by Citizen Action NY and the AFLCIO-NYS featuring a discussion with Senator Schumer and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez. Both NYS representatives pleaded with union leaders and other grassroots advocates to continue to block passage of any bill that would decimate healthcare, intensify economic disparities, reduce the availability of good paying jobs, severely reduce access to food stamps, and leave states scrambling to absorb massive cuts to core healthcare and other essential programs and services. This has been our strategy from the beginning – to implore NY Republicans to vote ‘no’ on any/all draconian Republican Reconciliation proposals, while supporting our Senators and working with national organizations to reinforce and enhance the impressive power and success they have had organizing at a national level against attacks on Medicaid, the ACA and other core federal entitlements, while we continue to call out the FFY26 Trump executive budget proposals that would result in critical block grant losses that will directly impact our ability to continue to serve New Yorkers with mental health and substance use disorder challenges.
Let’s continue to pound the virtual pavement.
Feel free to use the following links or go to the NYS Council’s Website at: www.nyscouncil.org and tab over to our Advocacy page where you can click on the Legislative Action Center and send letters to all NYS elected leaders in Washington. PLEASE CONTINUE TO CONTACT LAWMAKERS IN WASHINGTON OVER THE WEEKEND!
Here are some useful links from the National Council:
Here’s more from Politico today re: the race to pass a Senate bill by July 4:
GOP senators and staff now believe Saturday is the earliest voting will start on the bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged Thursday that parliamentarian rulings forcing Republicans to rewrite key provisions of the bill are throwing his timeline into chaos.
A Saturday vote would assume no more major procedural issues, but that is not assured: Republicans could run into trouble with their use of current policy baseline, the accounting tactic they want to use to zero-out the cost of tax-cut extensions. Other adverse recommendations from Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough could force additional redrafts of Republicans’ tax plans.
Even if Republicans resolve every outstanding issue with the parliamentarian in the next 24 hours, Thune needs to firm up his whip count. The cap on state provider taxes remains among the thorniest issues, with senators threatening to block debate on the megabill until the Medicaid financing issue is resolved.
If the Senate does vote Saturday to proceed, expect Democrats to use the bulk of their 10 hours of debate time, while Republicans forfeit most of theirs. Then comes the main event — vote-a-rama — which would set up likely final passage for sometime Sunday.
That starts the timer for the House. GOP leaders there have pledged to give members 48 hours’ notice of a vote — and they have already advised the earliest that voting could happen is Monday evening. Republicans will have to adopt a rule before moving to debate and final passage.
But the House’s timeline depends wholly on what condition the megabill is in when it arrives from the Senate. Groups of House Republicans are already drawing red lines on matters ranging from SALT to clean-energy tax credits to public land sales. The hope is that the Senate will take care of those concerns in one final “wraparound” amendment at the end of vote-a-rama.
If they don’t, House GOP leaders are adamant that there will need to be changes — likely pushing the timeline deep into July, or perhaps beyond. For one, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday the Senate’s slower phase-out of clean-energy tax credits “will need to be reversed,” or else.
“If there are major modifications that we cannot accept, then we would go back to the drawing board, fix some of that and send it back over,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Thursday. “So we should avoid that process, if possible.”
Senate Republicans Reprise Push to Pay for Tax Cuts by Slashing Food Stamps
Party lawmakers have devised a way around an earlier procedural roadblock to their safety-net cuts.
By Tony Romm
Reporting from Washington
Published June 26, 2025Updated June 27, 2025, 7:45 a.m. ET
Senate Republicans said on Thursday that they would forge ahead with a plan to slash federal food assistance to the poor, after they devised a workaround that would allow them to cut the program to help pay for their sprawling package of tax cuts.
The proposal, which would force states to shoulder new costs for providing food stamps, is part of a larger set of changes targeting federal safety-net programs that may result in millions of lower-income Americans losing access to aid.
For decades, the federal government has shouldered the primary financial burden for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or S.N.A.P., which provides about 42 million low-income Americans on average with monthly food benefits. Its supporters say the payments are essential, with roughly one in seven Americans reporting inconsistent access to food in 2023, government data show.
But Republicans insist S.N.A.P. is riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, and they have sought to scale back its benefits as part of the package of tax cuts they are crafting with the input and support of President Trump. The House version of that measure, which party lawmakers adopted in May, aimed to impose new work requirements on recipients while seeing states finance a potentially significant portion of the program.
But Senate Republicans said on Thursday that they had retooled some of the mechanics of their plan, ultimately earning the parliamentarian’s approval.
Much as before, the new approach would shift a percentage of the cost of providing S.N.A.P. benefits to the states based on the percentage of erroneous payments they report in a given fiscal year. But Republicans primarily tweaked how that rate of payment would be computed under the system, which would take effect in 2028.
Republicans did not release the full details of the changes. Senator John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas who leads the chamber’s agriculture committee, said in a statement that the new plan “encourages states to adopt better practices, reduce error rates, be better stewards of taxpayer dollars, and prioritize the resources for those who truly need it.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement that the proposal would “cut food assistance for millions of Americans to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
The battle over S.N.A.P. nonetheless has emerged as a significant political touchstone for Republicans, as economists have found that the party’s signature legislation is likely to deliver great benefits to the rich while taking away from the poor.
Both Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have rejected these findings, and some of the party’s most conservative lawmakers have sought even steeper cuts to federal programs, including Medicaid, though some of their proposals have faced their own roadblocks with the Senate’s rule-keepers.
Studying the House version of the bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office previously found that the full suite of Republican changes to S.N.A.P. might save $285 billion over the next 9 years, offsetting a small fraction of a bill that is expected to add more than $3 trillion to the federal debt over that period.But analysts also determined that the state funding requirement, if implemented, could result in the reduction or elimination of benefits for 1.3 million poor Americans in an average month. Some states could even opt to stop offering S.N.A.P. entirely if their budgets could not afford the new expense, the report found.
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to produce a fiscal analysis of the Senate bill. Earlier this week, Gov. Josh Stein of North Carolina, a Democrat, led 23 states in urging Republicans in Congress to preserve existing federal funding for food stamps, warning that their states may not be able to cover additional costs.
“Cuts to S.N.A.P. will mean that millions of Americans won’t get the food they need for their families,” they wrote. “And it will result in too many Americans forced to survive rather than thrive.”