The United States Senate is mired in a marathon “vote-a-rama” that has stretched past 21 hours with no clear end in sight and, crucially for Republican leaders, still no guarantee that they can marshal the 50 votes needed to advance President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spending bill. The GOP holds a 53-47 majority, but party unity has cracked under the weight of a reconciliation package that the Congressional Budget Office says will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion even as it slashes Medicaid and nutrition assistance for low-income families.
The depth of the impasse was captured shortly after dawn when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted, “Because it’s a moral monstrosity.” Earlier he had spelled out the arithmetic behind the deadlock: “We have been debating amendments for 21 hours and we are still going because through 12 hours of debate and 21 hours of amendment votes, Republicans still don’t have 50 votes for their bill,” he wrote at roughly 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
With every Democrat opposed, Republicans can afford to lose no more than three members. As of Tuesday morning, Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) remained publicly opposed; Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) were undecided, and Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) said he was “on the fence.” The narrow margin has given individual senators unusual leverage in a chamber that normally requires 60 votes to surmount a filibuster but needs only a simple majority for budget reconciliation.
Much of the internal revolt centers on health-care and food-assistance provisions. The CBO projects that nearly 12 million people would lose coverage under the Senate text. In a floor speech that stunned colleagues over the weekend, Tillis asked, “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore?”
Republican leaders have tried to lure Murkowski into the yes column with a proposal temporarily shielding Alaska from the legislation’s deepest reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The carve-out drew an immediate rebuke from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, who called the idea “absurd” and added on social media, “Insanity reigns.”
Even lawmakers who support the overall bill acknowledge its legislative sprawl and political risks. The measure runs 940 pages and originally contained a ten-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence; that controversial rider was stripped on a 99-1 vote in the early-morning hours as Republicans scrambled to shore up backing elsewhere.
The eye-popping CBO score has revived long-simmering Republican disagreements over deficit spending. International bond investors have begun talking openly about diversifying away from U.S. Treasuries, and fiscal hawks inside the caucus say the numbers undercut the party’s traditional deficit-reduction brand. Majority Whip John Thune told reporters only, “Not yet,” when asked to predict a final vote time.
Complicating matters is a high-profile spat between Trump and Elon Musk, who on Monday threatened to bankroll primary challengers to any Republican backing the bill because of its cost. The former president fired back by suggesting future cuts to federal contracts that benefit Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla, injecting yet another layer of uncertainty into the vote count.
Outside the marble corridors, advocacy groups warn that the bill’s Medicaid reductions would translate into shuttered rural hospitals and interrupted care for seniors and children. Nutrition advocates say the SNAP cuts could remove food assistance from millions just as grocery prices remain elevated. Though the legislation also extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, Democrats note that the extension is financed in part by scaling back safety-net programs that help the most vulnerable.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) summed up the Democratic critique after hours of amendment votes: “Kicking millions off healthcare, blowing up the national debt by trillions, and devastating generational economic harms—all being written into law on the fly,” she said in the pre-dawn gloom.
Trump has demanded passage before the July 4 holiday, a timetable aides say is meant to lock in the tax cuts before campaign season accelerates. Yet Sen. Tillis, speaking to reporters during a temporary lull in voting, cautioned that procedural snags still abound: “They’re still trying to get a resolution on the vote, and we’ll probably have an hour delay, because they’ve got to get all the technical corrections right,” he explained, underscoring how even sympathetic members are frustrated by last-minute drafting.
If the Senate does steer the bill through, it must still return to the House for final approval, where conservatives concerned about debt and moderates worried about Medicaid have their own misgivings. Failure, meanwhile, could reopen a wider budget showdown later in the summer and leave federal agencies operating on stopgap spending bills.
For now, though, the Senate remains locked in a procedural trench war of amendments, quorum calls, and whispered hallway negotiations. The most potent argument against the measure may be the one Republicans are hearing from within their own ranks—that the bill exacts too steep a price from the country’s most vulnerable to justify swelling the national debt. As Murphy reiterated while the sun rose over a chamber still voting, “Because it’s a moral monstrosity.”
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