Evening Edition: Senate Republicans Ready For Marathon Vote On Spending Bill
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I'm Janice Dean. I'm Jason Chaffetz. I'm Harris Faulkner. And this is the Fox News Rundown.

Monday, June 30th, 2025. I'm Eben Brown. President Trump wants Congress to pass his one big beautiful bill so he can sign it by the 4th of July. That's this week. Will it happen? You can't really pass this through the House of Representatives if you have more than three defections. You can't get it through the Senate if you have more than three defections. There's already two. Rand Paul and

and Tom Tillis. So while we think this is going to pass the Senate overnight tonight, and we think this will pass the House, maybe it won't. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. ♪

It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz. Fox. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz. Congress is notorious for never passing a concrete budget all at once. Spending matters usually come through a handful of bills, as do tax breaks.

And then there's the infamous reconciliation bills that come after both the House and Senate passed differing versions of the same thing. It's especially annoying when it comes to the tax matters, and that's why President Trump has been pushing the Congress to get everything from appropriations to extending his tax cuts from 2017 into a single piece of legislation, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

Aversion has passed the House. The Senate is now doing its business. President Trump wants this put to bed by July 4th.

But the Senate is in the midst of what is often called Vote-O-Rama. Vote-O-Rama, Vote-A-Palooza, just a really long vote series. That's really what it is. It's a marathon. Fox's Chad Pergram is watching it all from his reporter's perch at the U.S. Capitol. And this is something that is allowed under this special process called budget reconciliation, where you can avoid...

a filibuster if you comply with these special budget rules and go through this process. But what it does is allows for a limited debate process. You only need 51 votes to finish the bill and you don't have a filibuster. But then what happens is you potentially could face this lengthy vote series. And that's what it is. What really has happened with these voter ramas over the years is the other side tries to get the other side

on the record taking bad votes, frankly, and then they use them against them politically. And so Democrats are using this opportunity where they take vote after vote after vote, where they are, you know, to say, look, you know, you guys voted for this, you voted for this. Can we believe that? And they'll use that in campaign ads next fall as we get closer to the 2026 midterms.

So that's really what's going on here. The shortest voterama we've had in recent years, and you don't have one every year, but this is our third already this year in preparation for the big, beautiful bill, is one that is going on for probably about nine hours is the shortest, about 15 is the latest. And we think that they will probably, if they have the votes, wrap this up sometime between about 10 and 2 tonight, if they have the votes.

Let's talk about if they have the votes. Anyone who is just sort of, you know, at the very margins been paying attention, Republicans have congressional majorities. Do they not have the votes to get something done, especially something that the president has been pushing for? I mean, this has sort of been the signature piece of legislation so far this term. You're right. The president has demonstrated tremendous sway with the Republican Congress, both in the House and the Senate so far.

But one wonders whether or not this deviation by Tom Tillis, the Republican from North Carolina yesterday, and he gave a pretty impassioned speech where he got up and just spoke out against the bill and just torched it, frankly, and then announced also earlier in the day that he was not going to run for reelection.

And so one wonders if that cracks the door open to other people to say, hmm, maybe I shouldn't vote for this. You know, Eben, I remember back in the 70s, there was that Life cereal commercial and there was Mikey. Remember, none of the kids would eat the cereal. And then all of a sudden he started to eat the cereal and then everybody else liked the cereal. So we wonder maybe, maybe, maybe if Tom Tillis is Mikey.

And you don't need many, but maybe others start to eat the cereal and say maybe this isn't what we should be voting for. The bigger problem, frankly, is in the House of Representatives, because in the House, you know, you might have more Mikeys just because it's a bigger house. And the other thing here is that the Freedom Caucus, which is this group of about 30 to 40 ultra-conservative members, it has just put out a statement noting that there was no deficit spending in the House bill that was passed in May.

And their evaluation here is that there's at least, and this is on a good day, there's a lot of different ways to crunch these numbers here, Evan. On a good day, according to Freedom Caucus, there would be $651 billion in deficit spending on this bill. And that's before interest costs and interest costs usually double that. So that would get you to 1.2 trillion, according to them. And the Freedom Caucus said that is not what we agreed to.

So, you know, you can't really pass this through the House of Representatives if you have more than three defections. You can't get it through the Senate if you have more than three defections. There's already two, Rand Paul and Tom Tillis. So while we think this is going to pass the Senate overnight tonight, and we think this will pass the House by the end of the week, certainly because of what we talked about at the top of our conversation, the influence of President Trump,

Maybe it won't because it's about the math. And I've just laid out the math. Having that much deficit spending is certainly a no go for a lot of people. And I would think that the president wouldn't really like it either. But he he does want this thing to pass at this point.

Yeah, he is absolutely on the hook for this. Now, what he has done is given them a little bit of a leeway here, where he was pushing, pushing, pushing July 4th. And then last week, he gave both counter statements within the same afternoon, publicly saying at a public event, "It doesn't have to be the 4th. It could slip a little bit. That's fine." He said the same thing on our air over the weekend with Maria Bartiromo.

And then there was a posting on Truth Social where he was like, well, you know, the House has to get this done by the 4th. You're really cutting it tight regardless. And the Senate bill, as the Freedom Caucus points out, is different. I knew that there was a lot going on and there was some concern about this when, you know, I said, can I use this on the record? And he said, yes, this is Jason Smith, who is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House. So he writes the tax provision of the bill.

And after I was on the air yesterday, he had reached out to me and said, you know, 85% of the 103 tax provisions we put in the bill are the same in the Senate bill. And so that's kind of what they're marketing this to these potential no votes in the House is saying, you know, you're getting 85% of what we did. But some folks in the House want more. I will say, though, Eben, there is what we call the fold caucus here on Capitol Hill. So

Sometimes where these members talk a good game and they complain right to the last minute and then they sigh and vote yes. Will the Congress be able to pass the one big, beautiful bill by President Trump's imposed July 4th deadline? We'll still find out with Fox's Chad Pergram on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Please like and subscribe. We'll have more straight ahead.

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We're so used to seeing a handful of appropriations bills and then maybe a bill for a tax cut or a tax reform in some capacity. This is a very different thing to have everything wrapped into one big. Well, there it goes again. One big, beautiful bill. It's something that the president has has pushed for. And there has been some, I guess, some, you know,

You know, some people have been kind of mildly enthusiastic about doing it this way. Other people have just flat out said this is no way to run the government. I guess we don't really have the answer yet. But how good of a tactic is this to put everything into one big bill?

Well, it makes it it makes it easier in some respects because it's easier parliamentarily because what we talked about earlier about, you know, you'd have to crack a filibuster over and over and over again on multiple bills. And when you only have 53 votes in the Senate and you need 60 votes to crack a filibuster, guess what? You're not going to get any of that done.

So you're probably better to do this. But the problem is, did you make the bill too big? Is it waiting down the truck? And I'm old enough to remember that it wasn't that long ago that Republicans and conservatives and, dare I say, members of the Freedom Caucus, they pushed and ran on the idea that we should have single-issue bills.

Guess what? This is anything but. The difference, though, is that this is what President Trump wants. So some people are willing to go along with that. Right. One thing that's in there is the thing that probably most people are interested in, that is some kind of extension or making permanent the 2017 tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. There is a big fear among Joe taxpayer and Jane taxpayer, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, that if this whole thing blows up,

they're going to be on the hook for an income tax demand that they they're not used to paying, that they have sort of worked it. You know, they've gotten out of that in their their family budgets. And that that has, I think, a lot of people a little nervous.

Yeah. And that's been the argument that Republicans have said, you know, that we have to renew this because of this. And they pointed out that they think that, you know, this bolstered the economy some. But that said, back in 2017, it didn't help them in the midterms in 2018, frankly. You know, and it's hard to say exactly what the economy would have been like had we not had the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, I put this this way on the air the other night, though.

You know, they do these projections about what is going to happen and we're going to have this percentage of growth. Therefore, the tax receipts will be such and such. You know, these are all projections. You know, these are crystal balls. And you always have this problem because never. And I've been around this place now for 30 years. Yeah.

With one occasion, have I ever seen it get better on the deficit side? That was in the 1990s when there was an agreement between Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House, and Bill Clinton. Yeah. And things were actually getting pretty good. And then what happened? 9-11. Then what happened? War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq as well.

Then what happened? You know, COVID-19. You always have terrorism. You always have wars. You always have these other things that suck out all this money from Washington. If they're ever able to change that trajectory, they're in business. But that hasn't been the historic case.

It seems like the way we hear the rhetoric and the temperature of everything, that there wouldn't be a kind of agreement like we saw with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich again, or a Reagan and a Tip O'Neill type of thing. Yeah, it was Republicans and Democrats working together.

Here, they're trying to do it only with their majority because the Republicans think that the Democratic ideas are so noxious, they're not going to touch that with a 10-foot pole and vice versa. Right. So that's the difference. So are we all doomed is the big question? Well, my wife calls me Dr. Doom at home, so I would say yes. I don't know that we're doomed, but I did just lay out the historical background. Right. And it ain't favorable.

All right. Chad Pergram, our Fox News Capitol Hill correspondent. Thank you so much for being with us on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Thank you. You've been listening to the Fox News Rundown. And now stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at FoxNewsPodcasts.com. Listen ad-free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on Amazon Music. And for up-to-the-minute news, go to FoxNews.com.

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