A marathon voting session on President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill is underway in the Senate and has stretched overnight into the early hours of Tuesday morning after a weekend of negotiations and delays, CNN reports.
The vote-a-rama – an open-ended series of votes on amendments, some political, some substantive – started around 9:35 a.m. on Monday and is still going with no end in sight. The extended voting session 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.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters around 1 a.m. on Tuesday that “progress is a very elusive term” when asked if lawmakers are making progress toward a final vote.
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 have zeroed in on Medicaid and other safety-net programs, such as food stamps, as they message against the president’s agenda. The vote-a-rama 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.
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.
