President calls for passage of signature tax bill but it’s not yet clear whether Senate Republicans have sufficient votes
Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen if his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.
The president’s intervention comes as Senate majority leader John Thune mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, ahead of a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.
But it is unclear if Republicans have the votes to pass it through Congress’s upper chamber, and whether any changes the Senate makes will pass muster in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority passed the bill last month by a single vote and which may have to vote again on a revised version of the bill.
Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.
