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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told fellow Democrats they will force the out-loud reading of the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” if the Senate votes to start debate Saturday.

The maneuver, which was described by a person granted anonymity to describe private plans, is meant to slow down Senate passage of the megabill and give Democrats more time to raise awareness of provisions inside of it. The reading of the bill by clerks is provided for under Senate rules but is almost always waived by unanimous consent.

Senate aides estimate reading the 940-page bill could take about 15 hours. When Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) forced the reading of Democrats’ 628-page American Rescue Act in 2021, it took 10 hours and 44 minutes. (Johnson said he bought the clerks a case of wine afterward.)

“Schumer believes Americans deserve to hear exactly what’s in this monstrosity: permanent tax breaks for billionaires, millions of Americans losing health care and food assistance, giveaways to fossil fuel companies and land sales to the highest bidder — all paid for by working families,” the person said.

Jim McLaughlin, one of President Donald Trump’s top pollsters, said Hill Republicans should nix Senate Republicans’ deeper Medicaid cuts in the megabill or risk deep backlash from voters.

“The Senate needs to go back to the House version on Medicaid in the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act], just like the president wants,” Jim McLaughlin, who runs McLaughlin & Associates, told POLITICO Saturday.

He continued: “The working class Americans who gave President Trump his overwhelming victory as well as majorities in the House and Senate deserve nothing less.”

More than a dozen at-risk House Republicans are deeply alarmed at the Senate’s decisions to keep its deeper Medicaid cuts in newly unveiled text, including the politically explosive provider tax.

They’re warning they won’t support the bill unless the Medicaid language moves closer to the House text.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said on Saturday that he will back President Donald Trump’s signature legislation after Republicans made changes to the health care language, helping leadership shore up their whip count.

“I’m going to vote yes on this bill,” Hawley said.

Hawley, whose intentions had been unclear, said he was satisfied by a change that would delay implementing changes to the provider tax language, which most states use to help cover Medicaid costs. He was also encouraged by an increase in the rural hospital fund, which means that his state will get more Medicaid funding for the next four years.

Hawley’s decision comes as Majority Leader John Thune is expected to hold an initial vote on the megabill on Saturday, setting up final passage as soon as Sunday.

Several senators have yet to say if they will vote to start debate or help pass the final bill. Thune can lose no more than three GOP senators and still let Vice President JD Vance break a tie.

After Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) liked an Instagram post congratulating him on his win.

The only problem — Jackson Lee died last July.

From ghost-likes and new profile pictures to a posthumous endorsement, accounts for dead lawmakers have seemingly resurrected on social media in an unsettling trend of beyond-the-grave engagement.

“Dear White Staffers,” an anonymous account dedicated to highlighting experiences and perspectives of non-white congressional staffers, on Wednesday posted a screenshot of a notification that the late Texas representative’s account had liked the congratulatory post for Mamdani, captioning the screengrab with a quizzical emoji.

But Jackson Lee isn’t the only deceased lawmaker whose presence continues to be felt online.

Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who filled Lee’s Texas seat for a brief two months before his own passing in March 2025, appeared to change his profile picture on X three weeks after he died.

“Happy #OpeningDay!” Turner’s personal account posted on MLB Opening Day, adding the hashtag “NewProfilePic” along with a photo of the late lawmaker holding a baseball. A community guidelines note affixed by X to the post noted that “Sylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025.”

The post appeared to shock many X users, who commented on how uncanny it was to see the deceased lawmaker active on their feeds. “Grim,” one user wrote, while another asked: “So no one on his team thinks this is weird?”

Former Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who died in May, has also continued to make waves from beyond the grave, as his political social media accounts chugged back to life to notify followers that early voting had begun in the race to fill his vacant seat. Before his passing, Connolly had endorsed his former chief of staff, James Walkinshaw, to replace him, having announced that he planned to step away from Congress after his esophageal cancer returned in April.

People on Connolly’s mailing list have also reportedly continued receiving emails from the late representative’s campaign encouraging Virginians to vote for Walkinshaw in Saturday’s special election, the newsletter Chaotic Era highlighted — and directing donations to Walkinshaw’s campaign.

But after Connolly’s posthumous post came under scrutiny this week, it disappeared from the late Virginian’s page on Thursday.

Brian Garcia, communications director for Walkinshaw’s campaign, emphasized that the campaign does not direct the content posted from Connolly’s accounts. “Supervisor Walkinshaw is proud to have earned the support of Congressman Connolly before he passed away and to now have the support of the Connolly family,” he said.

The bio for Connolly’s page notes that the lawmaker died in May, and says that posts on the page are made with Connolly’s family’s consent. Turner’s account also appears to be run by his family, with the account recently posting a video featuring his daughter promoting a Houston parade he championed.

But the case of posthumous tweeting fingers isn’t a new phenomenon.

An account for political activist, brief 2012 GOP presidential primary leader and staunch Trump supporter Herman Cain resurfaced two weeks after he died in July 2020 from a weekslong battle with Covid-19. The account posted attacks at then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and pro-Trump content — as well as conspiracy theories about the virus that had taken Cain’s own life.

The posts initially appeared under Cain’s original account, bearing his name and profile picture. But his daughter shortly thereafter explained in a blog post that members of his family had taken over his social media presence and would continue posting under the new name “Cain Gang.”

The account remained active until March 2021, when it released its final post, saying “It’s time.”

How to handle the social media presence of politicians when they die is a fairly new phenomenon. If a member of the House dies, for example, their office often remains open to fulfill constituent services — and sometimes continues posting to social media, albeit not typically under the lawmaker’s name. And there’s even less clarity around lawmakers’ social media accounts that they use for campaigning, as opposed to official work.

Zack Brown, who was the communications director for Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) when he died in office in March 2022, said there is no official process for handing off control of lawmakers’ social media accounts if they die while still serving. That leaves communications staff in an awkward bind on how to proceed with languishing accounts, he said.

Although there were content rules on what staff members were allowed to post to Young’s accounts — political, policy-related and ideological posts were off-limits — there was no guidance on what to do with the accounts themselves.

“When a member of Congress dies, nobody seems to care about getting the log-ins from you, or assuming control of the Facebook page,” Brown said. “I still, if I wanted to, could go post to Facebook as Congressman Young — I could still tweet today as Congressman Young. And nobody from archives or records or from House administration, or anybody, seems to give a shit.”

Brown continued serving in the Alaskan’s office for four months after his death, administering the affairs of the office and helping wind down its operations to prepare for Young’s replacement after the special election.

While the process of physically closing down Young’s office was “meticulous,” with individual files and knickknacks from the lawmaker’s office requiring logging, the “digital aspect of it was completely ignored,” Brown said.

Brown noted that failing to properly administer a lawmaker’s social media presence is also a constituent services issue, as many people reach out to their representative’s offices via direct message for assistance.

But most of all, Brown cautioned, a lack of procedure for how to handle dead lawmaker’s’ socials poses a host of security risks that would normally be unthinkable for physical record-keeping.

“I can’t walk into the National Archives right now and just go behind closed doors and take whatever files from Congressman Young that I want,” Brown said. “Why does somebody who had social media access have that power to do that with tweets?”

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

Senate Republicans have included compromises on key Medicaid and tax issuesin updated text for their sweeping domestic policy bill.

In an effort to placate GOP moderates on the fence on the legislation, Senate Republicans are planning to provide a $25 billion stabilization fund for rural hospitals over five years. It’s a significant bump up from the $15 billion offer Senate Republican leadership had made to a group of Medicaid moderates, who have balked at the steep cuts to the health program contained in the marque legislation.

Senate Republicans would also delay planned cuts to provider taxes that fund state obligations to Medicaid. The changes would still incrementally lower the allowable provider tax in Medicaid expansion states from 6 percent down to 3.5 percent.

But the drawdown would begin in 2028, one year later than planned — in a nod to concerns from senators like Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who warned this week that resulting cuts to Medicaid could have disastrous electoral consequences in the midterms.

The changes come as Senate Republicans are racing ahead with plans to hold a vote on their legislation Saturday. President Donald Trump still wants the bill on his desk by July 4, though Republicans, as of Friday evening, did not have the votes to start debate.

The language also reflects changes to the state and local tax deduction sought by blue state House Republicans. The New York, New Jersey and California Republicans have been in prolonged negotiations with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over a boost to the deduction, which Senate Republicans universally want lowered.

The new Senate text keeps House Republicans’ plan to increase the deduction from $10,000 to $40,000, but it would snap back to current levels after 2029. The new language likely shaves off at least $100 billion from the approximately $350 billion price tag of the House plan.

It’s still unclear, though, if the compromise would get all of the hardcore SALT Republicans to “yes.” In a Friday lunch with Senate Republicans, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he still had one holdout on the SALT deal -— a likely reference to Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), who indicated on Friday that, if there had been a deal, he was not part of it.

The text for the Finance committee, which has jurisdiction over tax policy and Medicaid, could still see major changes. That’s because the language still hasn’t been fully updated to reflect rulings from the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, on whether the contained provisions comply with strict budget rules.

The tax panel had their final meetings with MacDonough Friday night, but it’s unclear how she would weigh in, if at all, on tax provisions enacted under a novel accounting tactic called “current policy baseline. That tactic takes the unprecedented step of zeroing out trillions of tax cut extensions. Senate Republicans are relying on it to make a slew of provisions, from individual to business tax cuts, permanent.

Republican leaders are expecting to finish up their domestic-policy megabill the same way they’ve advanced it this far: by tweaking their plans for President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda and daring holdouts to vote against it.

It might work, and GOP leaders are projecting confidence that the bill will land on Trump’s desk in time to meet their arbitrary July 4 target. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Friday he expects his chamber to start voting as soon as Saturday.

But there are reasons the deadline could slip, and several of them were on display this week as Republicans dug in for the final scramble of negotiations.

For one, members continue to fight jealously to keep personal priorities in the bill — including parts of a $4 trillion package of tax cuts set to affect virtually the entire U.S. economy. Meanwhile, other lawmakers who have made the megabill into an ideological litmus test on federal spending and budget deficits are facing a put-up-or-shut-up moment after repeatedly drawing red lines and then moving forward with the legislation anyway.

Finally, a handful of key lawmakers are facing what could be existential political stakes as they brace for tough re-election contests in next year’s midterms. Many are balking at having to vote on cutbacks to safety-net programs, clean-energy projects and other federal assistance their states and constituents rely on.

Together, it’s turned the megabill’s endgame into a high-wire act — and Thune is keeping the pressure on, expecting his members will want to stay on the rope.

“We’ve cussed it. We’ve discussed it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Friday. “But we’re gradually going from thoughtful, rational deliberation into the foothills of jackassery. I mean, we’re talking about the same thing over and over and over.”

Thune, along with Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, have all calculated that allowing more debate will only work against them. They’ve already used the threat of a federal default later this summer to move the process along — the bill includes a debt-ceiling increase — but the Independence Day deadline has emerged as a tantalizing symbolic target.

Problem is, with groups of members digging in, the state of the negotiations isn’t necessarily jibing with that timeline. Thune wouldn’t say Friday whether he had the votes to even start debate: “We’ll find out.”

Among the biggest problems for Thune going into Saturday are four GOP fiscal hawks: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is an all-but-guaranteed “no” vote, while Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida are each in close touch with Trump and pledging to act in unison.

All of them have made dire warnings about the state of the nation’s finances, and they have pushed for much deeper spending cuts than what has been on offer. They have also been coordinating with members of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group that has made similar fiscal demands.

Every Freedom Caucus member save for Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), its chair, has voted to advance the megabill. But they’ve been strategizing about how to bend the legislation in their direction and trying to warn they will vote against the Senate bill if it moves too far in the other direction.

Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, one of 30 House Republicans who warned senators to abide by the House bill’s fiscal framework, said Friday he remained in a dug-in “no” vote on the Senate bill. He said he was even more adamant about his position given the Senate parliamentarian had effectively vetoed a provision he secured that would make it easier to obtain rifles and silencers.

“They just need to understand that if they don’t meet that and they send us back something that blows up the deficit, it’s not going to pass — period,” Burlison said. “And we mean it.”

Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a ringleader of the fiscal conservatives, told reporters Friday there’s a “good number” of ”no” votes among Republicans in the House, “and I think the Senate knows that.”

“I can’t go back to my people and say we increased the deficit a trillion dollars,” he said.

White House officials have ratcheted up their efforts to win over the holdouts. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been calling Freedom Caucus members this week to hear out their concerns. So far, he’s largely been in “listening mode,” according to two Republicans granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

Trump himself is “more fielding calls than making them” at this point, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to describe the president’s lobbying. He met Thursday with Johnson and Thune, and the official said the individual whipping of members would begin soon enough.

The message will be simple, the person said: “You can vote to end your career or not.”

That’s exactly what’s on the minds of several in-cycle senators, except they fear it’s a yes vote that could cost them re-election next year.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina openly warned his colleagues this week he will lose his reelection bid if they move forward with Medicaid provisions as currently drafted — in particular a curtailing of medical provider taxes, the mechanism the vast majority of states use to finance their Medicaid programs.

“Trust me when I tell you, my Republican colleagues and leadership of the legislature are not going to raise taxes to fill the gap, and even if they could, the number is too high,” Tillis said Friday, emphasizing he would not vote to start debate on the bill until the matter is addressed.

Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine, who are up for re-election next year, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who is up in 2028, are also closely following the Medicaid language. Leaders have so far offered a $15 billion fund to offset the provider tax changes and protect vulnerable hospitals, but Collins is pushing for $100 billion.

They have taken heart from reports that Trump is sympathetic to their position and would prefer the Senate retreat to the less drastic House provider tax proposal. But GOP leaders are intent on preserving the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings attached to the provision — in part to preserve a trio of permanent business tax breaks backed by key members of the Senate Finance Committee.

They’re also facing a crunch from the small but vocal group of blue-state House Republicans pushing for a larger state-and-local-tax deduction. Their demands could add another $350 billion in cost to the Senate bill, though there is a tentative deal to cut that figure in half.

After meeting with Trump Thursday, Thune said he believes the president has no strong attachment to the Medicaid provision and just wants whatever bill can get to his desk. He’s privately told Senate Republicans that he believes the House will take up and pass whatever the Senate sends over.

In other words, even if Thune’s gamble succeeds on his side of the Capitol, Johnson might soon be throwing the dice himself.

“Mike is nervous as a pregnant nun right now — he doesn’t know if he can get what we’re doing past his House,” Kennedy said. “He wanted us understandably not to touch a thing in the House bill — that wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime.”

Dasha Burns, Cassandra Dumay and David Lim contributed to this report. 

Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon will not seek reelection and plans to retire at the end of his term, according to two people familiar with his plans. The announcement is expected Monday and presents a major pickup opportunity for Democrats.

Bacon is a key GOP centrist in the House and represents one of only three Republican-held districts that Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election.

Bacon has met frequently with Nebraska state Sen. Brett Lindstrom in recent months, who Bacon allies view as the favorite to win the GOP primary to fill the seat. But Republicans widely believe Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson has a better chance of winning the primary, and he’s spoken with GOP operatives about the race.

Rep. Dusty Johnson will announce a bid for South Dakota governor Monday, according to two people granted anonymity to speak about private conversations.

Johnson has served as South Dakota’s sole House representative since 2019. He’s been a key player in major deals on Capitol Hill in recent years as the head of the Main Street Caucus of Republicans.

Johnson, long expected to mount a bid for higher office, will make the announcement in Sioux Falls.

Johnson is the eighth House Republican to announce a run for higher office in 2026. Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Byron Donalds of Florida, Randy Feenstra of Iowa, John James of Michigan and John Rose of Tennessee are also seeking governor’s offices; Reps. Andy Barr of Kentucky and Buddy Carter of Georgia have announced Senate runs.

Senate Republicans are planning to take an initial vote at noon on Saturday to take up the megabill.

Leadership laid out the timeline during a closed-door lunch on Friday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said after the lunch. A person granted anonymity to discuss internal scheduling confirmed the noon timeline but cautioned Republicans haven’t locked in the schedule yet.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune did not tell senators at the lunch that he currently has the votes to take up the bill. Several senators are not currently ready to vote “yes” over concerns about Medicaid language or the deficit. “We’ll find out tomorrow,” Thune told reporters, when asked if has 50 votes.

During the meeting, House Speaker Mike Johnson pitched Senate Republicans on the tentative SALT deal, according to three people in the room. He said the deal was as good as Republican can get, according to the people.

Johnson noted he still has “one holdout” — an apparent reference to New York Republican Nick LaLota, who said in a brief interview Friday that if there was a deal, he was not part of it.

Leaving the meeting, Johnson was asked by reporters whether he thought Senate Republicans would accept the SALT deal. “I believe they will,” he replied. “They’re going to digest the final calculations, but I think we’re very, very close to closing that issue.”

In the meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Johnson laid out details of the fragile agreement, telling Senate Republicans the House SALT deal would be cut in half, to total roughly $192 billion. They restated it would raise the SALT cap to $40,000 for five years under the current House-negotiated SALT deal, and snap back to the current $10,000 cap after that.

In related matters, Kennedy and Hoeven also said the Senate will keep its provider tax proposal but delay its implementation, which Republicans believe will help it comply with budget rules. and Johnson also told Senate Republicans that he wants to do another reconciliation bill — which senators took to mean they would get another opportunity to secure spending cuts or provisions passed that have been squeezed out of the megabill.

President Donald Trump on Friday backed off the July 4 deadline he set for Congress to pass his megabill, acknowledging the timing could slip as Republicans work through a series of political and logistical hurdles.

“It’s not the end-all,” Trump said of the self-imposed Independence Day goal. “It can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time if possible.”

The remarks represented a clear softening of the White House’s position from just a day earlier, when Trump administration officials insisted the GOP lawmakers pass the domestic policy package within a week despite a series of fresh obstacles.

Senate Republican leaders are still struggling to lock down the necessary 51 votes for the bill, amid objections from competing factions over the depth of the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.

The effort has also been hamstrung by a flurry of adverse rulings by the Senate parliamentarian that are now forcing lawmakers to rewrite significant portions of the bill.

The president indicated he has little interest as of now in trying to directly overrule or even fire the parliamentarian — a step that some close allies in Congress had called for after she disqualified several of the bill’s provisions.

“The parliamentarian’s been a little difficult,” Trump said. “I disagree with the parliamentarian on some things, and on other ways she’s been fine.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed those issues on Thursday, saying Trump still expected Republicans to coalesce in the coming days and put the bill on his desk by July 4.

But asked directly on Friday, Trump took a more ambivalent stance.

“We have a lot of committed people and they feel strongly about a subject, subjects that you’re not even thinking about that are important to Republicans,” he said, appearing to reference the policy divisions within the Senate GOP conference.

Trump also singled out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for praise despite his resistance to the bill, complaining instead about the lack of Democratic votes.

“The problem we have is it’s a great bill, it’s a popular bill,” Trump said. “But we’ll get no Democrats.”

If all Republicans vote for the bill, it would not need Democrats’ support to pass.