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Republican senators to watch in the maneuvering over Trump's big bill

Republican senators to watch in the maneuvering over Trump's big bill

Associated Press6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has set an ambitious timeline for passing President Donald Trump's sweeping legislation to cut taxes and spending. But getting it on the Republican president's desk by July 4 will require some big decisions, and soon.
Republican senators are airing concerns about different parts of the legislation, including cuts to Medicaid, changes to food aid and the impact on the deficit. To push the bill to passage, Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and other negotiators will need to find a compromise that satisfies both ends of their conference — and that can still satisfy the House, which passed the bill last month by only one vote.
A look at some of the groups and senators who leaders will have to convince as they work to push Trump's 'big, beautiful' bill toward a Senate vote:
Rural state lawmakers
Every Republican senator represents a state with a rural constituency — and some of their states are among the most rural in the country. Many in those less-populated areas rely heavily on Medicaid for health care, leading several of them to warn that the changes to the program in the bill could be devastating to communities that are already struggling.
Of particular concern is a freeze on a so-called provider tax that some states use to help pay for large portions of their Medicaid programs. The extra tax often leads to higher payments from the federal government, which critics say is a loophole that allows states to inflate their budgets. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and several others have argued that freezing that tax revenue would hurt rural hospitals, in particular.
'Hospitals will close,' Hawley said last month. 'It's that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.'
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville said Thursday that provider taxes in his state are 'the money we use for Medicaid.'
'You start cutting that out, we've got big problems,' Tuberville said. Eliminating those taxes 'might lose some folks.'
At the same time, Republican senators have little interest in a House-passed provision that spends more money by raising a cap on state and local tax deductions, known as SALT. The higher cap traditionally benefits more urban areas in states with high taxes, such as New York and California.
The House included the new cap after New York Republicans threatened to oppose the bill, but Senate Republicans uniformly dislike it. 'I think there's going to have to be some adjustment' on the SALT provision, Thune said Wednesday, noting that 'senators are just in a very different place' from the House.
Former (and maybe future) governors
The House-passed bill would also shift some Medicaid and food stamp costs to states, a change that has the former governors in the Senate, in particular, worried.
West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, who was governor of his state for eight years before his election to the Senate last year, said he favors many aspects of the bill. He supports the new work requirements for Medicaid and food stamp recipients, the restrictions on benefits for immigrants who are in the country illegally and the efforts to cut down on fraud. 'There's real savings there,' Justice said. 'But then we ought to stop.'
'We're on our way to cannibalizing ourselves,' Justice said. 'We don't want to hurt kids and hurt our families.'
The provision stirring the most unease would shift 5% of administrative costs to the state for administering food stamps — known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. States that have high error rates in the program would have to take on an even higher percentage of federal costs.
North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, also a former governor, said senators are working to get feedback from current governors and may propose some 'incentive-oriented ideas' instead of a penalty for the high error rates.
'We don't know if the states have really looked at the impacts of some of this yet,' Hoeven said.
Tuberville, who is running for governor of Alabama next year, said the program should be reformed instead of shifting costs.
'I know what our budget is and what we can afford, and we can't start a federal program and then say, 'Oh, let's, let's send it back to the states and let them take a big hunk of it,'' Tuberville said. 'I mean, that's not the way we do it.'
The moderates
Thune needs to bring Republican moderates on board with the bill, including Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Both have reservations with the Medicaid cuts, among other things.
Collins said she wants to review how the SNAP changes will affect her state. Murkowski has questioned expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act and whether they might be needed if people are kicked off Medicaid.
Last month, Murkowski said she wants to make sure that people are not negatively impacted by the bill, 'so we're looking at it through that lens for both Medicaid and on energy.'
Murkowski and Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Curtis of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas have also supported energy tax credits that would be phased out quickly under the House bill. The four senators argued that the quick repeal creates uncertainty for businesses and could raise prices for consumers.
The right flank
Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida have argued the legislation does not save enough money and threatened to vote against it.
Paul is considered the least likely to support the measure. He says he won't vote for it if it raises the debt ceiling — a key priority for GOP leaders in both the House and the Senate. The package would raise the nation's debt limit by $4 trillion to allow more borrowing to pay the nation's bills, as the Treasury Department says the limit needs to be raised by the middle of July.
Johnson has been railing against the legislation since it was unveiled in the House, arguing that it does little to reduce government spending over time. He took those arguments to Trump last week at a meeting between the president and members of the Senate Finance Committee.
After the meeting, Johnson said he would continue to argue that the bill needs to do more to cut costs. But he said he came away with the recognition that he needed to be 'more positive' as Trump exerts political pressure on Republicans to pass it.
'We're a long ways from making the deficit curve bend down, but I recognize that's going to take time,' Johnson said. 'The truth is, there are a lot of good things in this bill that I absolutely support. I want it to succeed.'

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Amid backlash, Tesla remained resilient in Texas

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The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. After years of trying to improve his hospital in Riverton, Wyoming—first as a doctor, then as a board member and volunteer activist—­Roger Gose was ready to give up. Gose, a Texas native, had been in Wyoming since 1978, when he saw an ad in a medical journal looking for a small-town internist. Ever since he was a kid, he had wanted to be a community doctor, the kind who made house calls and treated his neighbors from birth into adulthood. He found his calling in Riverton, a town of 10,000 people in one of the state's poorer counties. For 35 years, he ran a private practice and worked shifts at Riverton Memorial Hospital, even serving for a time as the chief of medicine there. After retiring from his practice in 2012, he joined the hospital board, still eager to do whatever he could to help. 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He couldn't fathom why a bank or a government would give Riverton Medical District a loan, considering the competition risk. The group, though, was unanimous: Shell's fears weren't going to stop them. They were the ones who lived there; they were the ones who, in Gose's words, felt an obligation to leave Riverton better than they found it. After months of looking into every other source of funding they could think of, Riverton Medical District turned to what the group considered the 'lender of last resort'—the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the primary government funder of projects affecting rural Americans. A community hospital in an underserved rural area fit the portfolio, which could qualify Riverton Medical District for low-­interest loans. Applying for government money, however, required navigating government bureaucracy. In an email exchange that stretched over months, the USDA rural-development regional director for Wyoming, Lorraine Werner, was encouraging but exacting. Every time Werner needed more documents, including a third-­party audit that cost an additional $50,000, the group would scramble to get them to her. Then she would ask for even more. It took Riverton Medical District more than a year to have its application accepted—­not for funding, just for consideration. Yet somehow, Riverton residents never seemed to grow tired of what looked to many outsiders like a quixotic scheme. To house the hospital, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe agreed to sell eight acres on the north end of town and donated four more acres outright. People kept handing over money, frequently $5 or $10 at a time. Finally, after an application process that took nearly two years, USDA announced its ruling. The federal government agreed that a new hospital in Riverton could be financially viable, committing to fund the lion's share of the costs—more than $37 million. It was the largest USDA rural-development loan ever awarded in the state of Wyoming. The money would fund a hospital offering every routine service Rivertonians had lost. It would have 13 inpatient beds, a full surgical department, two labor-and-delivery rooms, two rooms equipped for intensive care, and space for physical and speech therapy. It would be staffed to perform surgery and deliver babies 24 hours a day. And the building would be designed to accommodate future growth, with the potential to add 11 new patient rooms, additional surgery space, and more parking, board members told me. In its report, USDA was more bullish than Shell and Stroudwater had been; the agency's official assessment of the project barely referenced the threat of competition from the existing hospitals. Citing numbers provided by the Riverton Medical District board, USDA found that the hospital could break even with just 30 percent market share, far less than SageWest's 44 percent. The Riverton Medical District project, evaluators wrote, had generated a remarkable level of local support; the agency noted donations from individuals and businesses that added up to more than $1 million, and more than 200 letters of support. Several of the letters said that without a new hospital, they would move out of Riverton. Multiple business owners wrote that the lack of a fully functioning hospital left them unable to recruit and retain workers. Most of the USDA report was written in bureaucracy-­speak, but at one point the author slipped into first person: 'The applicant started a true grassroots movement to bring back essential services to the community and has exhibited a level of community support, both monetarily and otherwise, that is unseen in my experience.' In December 2024, just before the soil froze for the season, work crews broke ground on Riverton's new community hospital. 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Colombian presidential candidate in a critical condition following assassination attempt
Colombian presidential candidate in a critical condition following assassination attempt

Yahoo

time22 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Colombian presidential candidate in a critical condition following assassination attempt

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