‘Vote-a-rama’ drama as these 5 in GOP threaten McCain-like ‘thumbs-down’ moment on Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ bill

The beginning of the Senate’s marathon “vote-a-rama” session is underway as the upper chamber debates final passage of the so-called “one big, beautiful bill” addressing several of Donald Trump’s legislative priorities.

It was still unclear by Monday morning whether the vote would pass.

Republicans have only 53 seats in the Senate, which is not enough to overcome a filibuster by the Democrats. As a result, they plan to use a process called budget reconciliation. This would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple 51-vote majority as long as the bill relates to the federal budget. Vice President JD Vance can cast a tie-breaking vote.

A massive piece of legislation increasingly representing the norm on Capitol Hill, the “big, beautiful bill” is more than a simple budgetary package. It includes an extension of the 2017 Republican tax cuts, a costly proposition, as well as a surge in funding for Trump’s mass deportation efforts. The legislation would fund the hiring of nearly 20,000 new immigration agents, including 10,000 new ICE personnel alone.

Republicans found funding for those measures through cuts to Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP). The imposition of work requirements in the bill is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to result in millions losing Medicaid coverage over the next decade if passed, and changes to the legislation in the Senate would also effectively end the expansion of Medicaid in states that chose to do so after passage of the Affordable Care Act — resulting in millions more losing coverage.

Democrats are hoping to pick up four Republican defections in an effort to defeat the bill.

The “vote-a-rama” process allows for both parties to introduce amendments to the legislation, and it’s possible that the bill could change significantly before the final vote — which was set for late in the afternoon.

And the continued debate over the budget reconciliation package — officially the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” — leaves open a very real possibility for one or more Republican senators to have their own “John McCain moment” later in the day.

In 2017, the late Sen. John McCain, who at the time had an aggressive form of brain cancer, ping-ponged back and forth between Democrats and Republicans as both competed for his vote before he famously went to the Senate well and delivered his literal thumbs down to kill Trump and conggressional Republicans' attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

His deciding vote shocked members of both parties, and firmly ended any political momentum for ACA repeal efforts through the rest of Trump’s first term — a fact Trump never forgave of the late McCain. Even with twin majorities in Congress once again, Republicans have not yet floated a similar plan for ACA repeal.

As of Monday morning, meanwhile, two Republican senators looked to be hard "no" votes: Sens. Rand Paul and Thom Tillis.

Paul, the Senate’s leading libertarian, is demanding steeper spending cuts in the budget package, while Tillis opposes the extent of cuts to Medicaid, including the rollback of the program’s expansion. Tillis’s home state of North Carolina began the expansion of Medicaid coverage in the state under the ACA’s provisions in late 2023.

President Trump threatened Tillis plitically over the announcement that he would oppose the legislation in a Truth Social post. The senior North Carolina Republican then announced that he would not seek re-election next year.

Tillis, in turn, fired back in a tweet urging Trump not to endorse Mark Robinson, the state’s scandal-plagued former lieutenant governor, for his seat upon his retirement. Robinson, Tillis said, would lose his election by 20 points.

Three other Republicans are thought to be on the fence. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are both publicly critical of calls for cuts to Medicaid; neither have announced how they will vote on final passage. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is the last outlier, having expressed his own reservations about insufficient deficit reduction efforts though he seemed to get on the same page with GOP leadership Sunday evening.

With Vance set to break a tie, Collins and Murkowski are the likeliest candidates to block the bill — though they’d have to vote as a bloc to do so. To be successful, their votes would also require Paul and Tillis to remain in opposition, though Tillis at least seems immovable.

If Monday’s vote succeeds, Republicans will still have to put the legislation through the House of Representatives one final time for passage. Several members of the lower chamber, where Republicans hold an equally thin majority, have already expressed reservations about changes made to the legislation in the Senate.

The scope of the legislation and disagreements within the disparate factions of the House Republican caucus have already caused their share of drama in the weeks and months leading up to Monday’s vote-a-rama in the Senate.

The House narrowly passed the legislation after arguments between Speaker Mike Johnson and members of his caucus over raising the cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), as well as the bill’s Medicaid provisions. A major rift also erupted between the president and Elon Musk, formerly one of his chief advisers, over projections that the bill would add nearly $4trn to the national debt over a decade.

Musk, who spun out publicly and made accusations about Trump’s involvement with the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein before deleting them, criticized the legislation again on Saturday as voting neared.

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” he wrote. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”