Republicans Sidestep Senate Rules by Axing Military Spending & Tax Policy
GOP pulls fiscal fast one—dodges Senate roadblocks by gutting defense budgets and tax reforms.
The Maneuver:
No messy debates, no pesky rules—just a clean swipe of two contentious items from the agenda. Classic legislative jiu-jitsu.
Why It Matters:
When the system’s rigged, play the loopholes. Military hawks and tax-cut evangelists might grumble, but hey—efficiency over ideology, right? (Unless it’s their ideology.)
The Cynic’s Take:
Nothing unites Republicans like trimming red tape… unless it’s trimming their donors’ tax bills. Priorities, people.
Republicans remove military spending and tax policy to avoid Senate rule violations
Republicans deleted many big-ticket items that were originally in their House version. These included $2 billion for Pentagon military intelligence, over $500 million for missile development, and a policy to crack down on the employee retention tax credit, which had turned into a scam magnet during and after the pandemic. That last item alone was expected to generate more than $6 billion in offsets that were supposed to balance the bill’s other spending and tax cuts.
But none of that could survive the Senate parliamentarian’s review. If those policies stayed, the parliamentarian would’ve ruled the bill out of order under reconciliation rules. That WOULD have made it vulnerable to a filibuster and likely dead on arrival. So Republican leadership acted fast to rip out those items before the bill even reached the Senate.
They aren’t done yet. The Senate parliamentarian is still going through the rest of the package, and more sections could get cut for breaking budget rules. That means more adjustments are coming — and fast — because Republicans are still aiming to pass the full bill by July 4.
Leadership plans more changes while Senate rewrites bill
Trump’s party wants to rewrite and reintroduce some of the policies that got pulled. But they’ll try doing it through the Senate version instead, hoping they can get the language right this time without losing the fast-track privilege. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are writing their version of the package now, and they’ve got less than a month to lock it in.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, told reporters, “We’ll see what they produce,” referring to the Senate’s work. “I just need them to come to their final decisions on everything. So we’ll see how it shapes up.”
Behind closed doors, aides in both chambers know the timeline is tight. Some say that even if the Senate moves quickly, it could still take weeks or even months to finalize if their version drifts too far from what the House passed. That’s a problem, because neither chamber wants to go through another pingpong fight — sending the bill back and forth for revisions.
The current plan is to settle all disputes during the Senate process. That way, once the Senate finishes, the House can vote again — once — to approve the final product and send it to Trump. But for that to work, they’ll need to agree ahead of time on some major sticking points: spending cuts, business tax extensions, and the SALT deduction cap.
“There’s just a lot of coordination to hopefully avoid some of the potential snafus that could happen with something that’s this complicated,” said John Thune, the Republican whip.
Work is already underway. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York, met with Senate GOP staff on Wednesday to talk about raising the SALT cap. Over in a separate meeting Tuesday night, Chip Roy from Texas and Scott Perry from Pennsylvania sat down with budget hawks like Mike Lee, RON Johnson, and Rick Scott to push for tighter spending limits and to keep the House’s cuts to clean energy tax credits in place.
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