Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is facing strong pushback from members of the GOP conference over the Finance Committee's piece of President Trump's tax and spending bill, which largely ignores GOP senators' concerns about Medicaid cuts and the quick phaseout of clean-energy tax credits.

Senate Republicans who raised red flags over Medicaid spending cuts the House passed say they were blindsided by the Senate’s version of the bill, which would cut Medicaid by several hundred billion dollars beyond what the House proposed.

They are warning that the Finance Committee’s language will cause dozens of rural hospitals to close in their home states, require lower-income Americans to pay more for medical procedures and shift costs onto the states.

“I had no idea that they were going to completely scrap the House framework like this. This totally caught me by surprise. And I’ve talked to other senators, and that’s what I’ve heard consistently from everybody I’ve talked to,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has repeatedly warned about the impact of Medicaid cuts on his constituents and rural hospitals.

“No one was expecting this entirely new framework,” he said.

Hawley and other Republicans have complained for weeks that the House cuts to Medicaid went too far and called for changes, but those warnings appeared to have little impact on Thune or Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).

Instead, Thune and Crapo sided with conservatives, such as Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who called for deeper spending cuts than what the House passed.

GOP lawmakers and aides ascribed Thune’s decision to add even bigger spending cuts in the bill to his sensitivity to the broad desire within the Senate Republican conference for more........

© The Hill