Despite Speaker Johnson’s pleas to leave the House-passed version of President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” intact, Senate Republicans seem ready to overhaul the legislation as conservatives and moderates alike have been sounding alarm bells. Even some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in the Senate have said they cannot vote for the House bill as written. 

The House passed the bill by a margin of 215 to 214 early Thursday morning before lawmakers began their week-long Memorial Day recess. While it was a major achievement for Mr. Johnson, it was only the first salvo in what is sure to be a long battle. 

“I met with the Senate Republicans, all my colleagues over there last week … and I encouraged them, you know, to do their work, of course, as we all anticipate, but to make as few modifications to this package as possible,” Mr. Johnson told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning. 

“We’ve gotta pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House, and I have a very delicate balance here — very delicate equilibrium,” the speaker added with a laugh, referring to his three-seat majority. “It’s best not to meddle with it too much.”

Republican senators don’t seem to care what the speaker has to say, however. 

On the same program Sunday, Senator Johnson said the spending levels in the bill were “immoral” and “wrong” because of the increased deficit spending included in it. 

“My campaign promise in 2010 and every campaign after that was to stop mortgaging our children’s future. It’s immoral, it’s wrong, it has to stop,” the upper chamber’s Mr. Johnson said. “I’m extremely worried about that. That is my primary goal [in] running for Congress.”

“This is our moment,” he added, calling on his colleagues to crack down on federal spending now rather than at some future unknown date. “This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending.”

Senator Paul, too, says that he cannot vote for the legislation in its current form, not only because of the cuts to spending levels — which he calls wimpy” and “anaemic” — but because of the inclusion of a debt limit hike in the reconciliation package. 

In order to deal with raising the debt limit on a party-line vote and bypass any negotiations with Senator Schumer, Republicans will have to pass the bill before the “X-date” of default, which Treasury Secretary Bessent says will come sometime in mid-July. 

“There’s gotta be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong, deficits are wrong, and wants to go in the other direction,” Mr. Paul said on “Fox News Sunday” about his objections to the House legislation. 

“Somebody has to stand up and yell, ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ and everybody’s falling into lockstep on this,” Mr. Paul said. He confirmed that if the debt limit provision was stripped from the bill, he would “consider” voting for the legislation, though he also made it clear that he would not enjoy doing so if he got to that point.  

“Conservatives do need to stand up and have their voice heard. This is a problem we’ve been facing for decades now, and if we don’t stand up on it, I really fear the direction the country is going,” he added.
Several other Republicans have said the spending cuts and reforms to Medicaid have already gone too far in the House version of the bill. Senators Murkowski, Collins, and Moran have all said their states rely heavily on Medicaid for rural health programs and hospitals which must be protected. Senator Hawley calls any effort to cut Medicaid “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”