Musk Rages as Trump Tax Bill Slashes Electric Vehicle Credits
Elon Musk slammed the US Senate's latest version of President Donald Trump's multi-trillion dollar tax bill Saturday, raging online that the cuts to electric vehicle and other clean energy credits would be 'incredibly destructive' to the country.
Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, posted on his social media platform X about the bill, which the Senate was planning to put to an initial vote on Saturday. Musk recently left Trump's side after working for several months as the head of Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
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CNN
4 minutes ago
- CNN
Senate kicks off marathon voting session on Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill'
The Senate has kicked off its marathon voting session on President Donald Trump's sweeping domestic policy bill after a weekend of negotiations and delays. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune went to the floor Monday morning, he told reporters that 'hopefully we'll know soon enough' if Republicans' have the votes to pass the bill. 'This may take a little while,' he noted. The vote-a-rama – an open-ended, hourslong series of votes on amendments, some political, some substantive – provides an opportunity for Republicans to make any eleventh-hour adjustments to the package and Democrats to push on GOP weak points in the bill and put their colleagues on the spot. Those politically tough votes are likely to provide fodder for campaign ads down the line. Trump's multitrillion-dollar bill would lower federal taxes and infuse more money into the Pentagon and border security agencies, while downsizing government safety-net programs including Medicaid. Democrats are expected to zero in on Medicaid and other safety-net programs as they message against the president's agenda. Monday's exercise in stamina comes after Senate Democrats employed a major delay tactic over the weekend that forced clerks to spend more than a dozen hours reading aloud the entire bill. Senators then debated the bill into the early hours Monday before adjourning and returning to the chamber at 9 a.m. ET to begin offering amendments. Lawmakers are up against an extremely tight timeline to pass the legislation. The president has demanded Congress deliver the bill to his desk by the Fourth of July, but the measure must still go back to the House if it passes the Senate. A number of Republicans are closely watching any changes made to Medicaid provisions in the bill. The Senate version of the megabill would leave 11.8 million more people without health insurance in 2034, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis released over the weekend. That's more than the 10.9 million more people projected to be left uninsured by the House-passed version of the bill. Both chambers are calling for historic spending cuts to Medicaid, which provides coverage to more than 71 million low-income Americans, including children, senior citizens, people with disabilities and other adults. The package would also enact changes to the Affordable Care Act that are projected to reduce enrollment in the landmark health reform law that Trump and Republicans have long sought to dismantle. But the Senate version calls for even deeper cuts to the Medicaid, leading to the larger estimate. It would slash federal support for Medicaid by $930 billion over a decade, Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said over the weekend, citing a CBO estimate. The House version is projected to reduce federal spending on the program by about $800 billion, according to the CBO. Both chambers would require certain able-bodied adults ages 19-64 to work to maintain their Medicaid benefits for the first time in the program's 60-year history. But the Senate version would impose the work requirement on parents of children ages 14 and older, while the House version would exempt parents of dependent children. The Senate version would also lower the cap on the taxes that states levy on health care providers to help fund the program and increase reimbursement rates for providers. However, that provision would apply only to the 40 states and the District of Columbia that have expanded Medicaid to low-income adults. The House bill would put a moratorium on the states' existing provider taxes. The first vote taken by senators Monday dealt with a procedural argument over the so-called current policy baseline and how to calculate the costs of the bill. While it may seem dry, Republicans' use of current policy baseline in their calculations will set a precedent allowing both parties to be much more generous when calculating costs of tax bills going forward. Trump and some GOP leaders, including Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo, pushed the alternative 'current policy baseline' scoring method, which seemingly greatly minimizes the deficit impact of the bill because it would not include the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax provisions. The CBO, however, calculated the cost of the bill using its traditional scoring method, known as 'current law baseline,' which assumed the expiring provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts lapse as scheduled at the end of the year. It projected the Senate's bill would also cost far more than the House-approved bill, adding nearly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. The Senate version is costlier in large part because it contains bigger tax cuts, while shrinking some of the spending cuts and revenue raisers, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group. For instance, the Senate bill would make permanent three corporate tax breaks that were part of the 2017 law and would lessen the cuts to the food stamp program. 'They expand the giveaways and shrink the takeaways,' Goldwein told CNN. Using the current policy baseline, the Senate version would cost roughly $508 billion over the next decade, according to a separate CBO estimate released Saturday night.
CNBC
9 minutes ago
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Axios
11 minutes ago
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Supreme Court will take up Republican challenge to campaign finance restrictions
The Supreme Court will take up a challenge brought by Republicans that aims to strike limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with individual candidates. Why it matters: The case gives the high court an opening to further chip away at campaign finance restrictions erected decades ago. The law's supporters argue without the restrictions, large donors could sidestep individual contribution caps. Driving the news: The justices said Monday they would review a ruling from an appeals court that upheld a decades-old federal election law provision on coordinated party expenditures, one that the Supreme Court itself affirmed in 2001. The justices will hear oral arguments in the case in the fall. Coordinated party expenditure limits vary depending on a state's voting age population and the office sought. By the numbers: In 2025, the expenditure limits range from $127,200 to $3,946,100 for Senate nominees. For House races, the caps are $127,200 in states with only one representative and $63,600 in all other states. Catch up quick: The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee filed the lawsuit in 2022, joined by then-Sen. JD Vance and former Rep. Steve Chabot, another Ohio Republican. An appeals court upheld the provision, citing the Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in the FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee case. Zoom out: The Trump administration noted to the court in a May brief that while the Justice Department has "a longstanding policy of defending challenged federal statutes," it believes this is "the rare case that warrants an exception to that general approach."
