JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The massive tax and spending bill central to President Trump's agenda is one step closer to reality. After weeks of negotiations, in 49 consecutive votes that started Monday morning, the Senate approved President Trump's signature domestic policy bill around lunchtime today. It now goes back to the House of Representatives, where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson will have to reconcile the Senate changes with his members' competing priorities.
We're joined now by Michael Ricci. He's had a long career in Republican politics, including working as Speaker Paul Ryan's communications director and Speaker John Boehner's chief speech writer. Welcome to the program.
MICHAEL RICCI: Thank you for having me, Juana.
SUMMERS: Mike, just start if you can by giving us your immediate reaction to the passage of this bill in the Senate today.
RICCI: It took longer than I expected. You know, the Senate usually doesn't show us as much of the sausage-making as the House does. Even their votearamas (ph) are usually happening overnight, and we all wake up in the morning, and they're done. So to see this happen in the light of day - I'm sure it took longer than Leader Thune expected, but that's - when you have tight margins like this, that's what happens. But, you know, here we are, on the verge of meeting President Trump's July 4 deadline.
SUMMERS: And Majority Leader John Thune, as you mentioned, he had to make a lot of deals to bring along the noes in his party - even...
RICCI: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...Making concessions to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski around SNAP benefits for people in her state. I know that most of your experience...
RICCI: Right.
SUMMERS: ...When we've talked before is in the House, but I wonder, have you seen a deal come together quite...
RICCI: Sure.
SUMMERS: ...Like this before?
RICCI: Yeah, I mean, the more people are texting each other and reading the bill, you know, it's a bill that - it's got a lot - you're going to have a lot of conservative members in the House who are going to say, you know, I'm loyal to the president. I do whatever he needs. And, you know, you have this moderate senator who basically was able to pack this bill with, you know, tax breaks for whalers and things like that. And so I think the longer this bill's out there, the more people are going to discover that. And you may remember how much that hurt the political - the initial political image of Obamacare, how many deals were made at the end for Democrats. So I think House conservatives, the more they learn about the deals that Senator Murkowski was able to make, it's only going to add to the frustration. But, you know, I do believe that she was genuinely torn. And with, you know, losing Senator Tillis' vote over the weekend, it did give her leverage to...
SUMMERS: Right.
RICCI: ...Get as much as she could.
SUMMERS: Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the Senate bill would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. So how is House Speaker Mike Johnson going to be able to make the case to get his caucus behind this bill, particularly those fiscal hawks? I mean, the Freedom Caucus has warned that this bill violates a budget framework already endorsed by more than 30 House Republicans.
RICCI: Yeah, there was a - right - there was a fiscal framework that about, yeah, 30 or 37 House Republicans had said they needed to see the bill aligned with. The speaker did promise that he would make sure the bill did that. It's a time-honored tradition for speakers to go to the members and say, look, the Senate changed this on me. There's nothing I can do at this point. We've gotten the best deal we can. We can either, you know, go to conference and risk blowing the president's deadline, or we'll just, you know, take this.
And he'll probably start to make - you know, Juana, this is when speakers start to make a lot of promises. I'm sure we're going to hear in the next 24 hours about fiscal commissions, new DOGE efforts, more promises to cut spending. He's going to have to promise a lot to get over the finish line. But no matter how you cut it, you know, there's a lot they try to - the White House tries to put its own studies out there, its own analyses out there.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
RICCI: But there's no question the bill is not going to have the kind of - it's not going to be the kind of fiscal - the bill's not going to help as much as the fiscal hawks were hoping for.
SUMMERS: And then on the other side, there are the cuts to Medicaid, where early estimates...
RICCI: Right.
SUMMERS: ...Suggest that nearly 12 million people could lose their health care coverage under the bill, and many moderates and some conservatives in the House have warned that they cannot support the cuts in the bill. Did the Senate changes...
RICCI: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...To your mind, do anything to address that?
RICCI: So the Senate went more conservative on Medicaid than I think a lot of the - than the House expected. And I think, you know, on paper, Republicans are looking at polling saying that, you know, trying to take undocumented immigrants off the rolls is good. You know, work requirements make sense. Waste, fraud and abuse is common sense as well to cut. But, you know, as you know, Medicaid is tied up in rural hospitals...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
RICCI: ...Long-term care for seniors. There'll be a lot of governors, including probably some Republican governors over time, who have concerns about...
SUMMERS: OK.
RICCI: ...These provisions. It'll be interesting to hear what House members are hearing from hospitals, from governors, from rural areas over the next 24 hours. But at this point, again, you know, maybe they'll promise a second reconciliation bill to fix some of that, but a lot of this seems baked in the cake at this point, unfortunately.
SUMMERS: Mike, we've got about 30 seconds left here. Going back to that fact on Medicaid - that millions could lose their coverage with this bill - how big of a risk is this politically for congressional Republicans, many of whom will be starting reelection campaigns this time next year?
RICCI: You know, they're - they tried to delay all this so that it doesn't hit next year. So I think the burden would be a lot on these blue state governors in particular to try...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
RICCI: ...To make this about affordability and cost of living. If they can tie it to that the way we just saw affordability and cost of living...
SUMMERS: OK.
RICCI: ...Be a big issue last week in New York...
SUMMERS: Right.
RICCI: ...I think that will be the test of whether it's a defining issue in the election.
SUMMERS: We'll leave it there. That's Mike Ricci, who served in many positions for many Republicans in leadership. He's now a partner at Seven Letter and a professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. Thank you.
RICCI: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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