AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Senate is in session.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CLERK: Section 32912 of Title 49 United States Code is amended. One in subset...
RASCOE: That's a clerk reading aloud the text of President Trump's massive tax and spending bill. Republicans are racing to get a version of it through the Senate and back to the House. Trump has said he wants to sign it into law by July 4. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson is watching the legislation and joins us now. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
RASCOE: So is that Independence Day deadline slipping?
LIASSON: Well, it could slip a bit. Trump has said he wants the bill on his desk by July 4 but that the deadline could slip. Last night, the bill advanced in the Senate. It passed a procedural hurdle 51 to 49. Two Republicans in the Senate voted against it, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and all the Democrats voted no. But under the fast-track rules known as reconciliation with no filibusters allowed, this bill is now on track for final passage in the Senate tomorrow. According to the Congressional Budget Office and other independent analysts, the bill's benefits are still skewed to the wealthy with big tax cuts, and they're paid for with cuts to Medicaid, which will affect a lot of lower-income people, including many Trump voters in red states.
RASCOE: So what are the chances that the compromises to get this bill to the finish line could result in too many compromises that causes the bill to fail?
LIASSON: That's a good question, but it's hard to imagine that the current Republican majority in Congress will vote against the president. Almost everything - his entire legislative agenda - is packed into this one bill, and there's no president in modern times who's had a firmer grip on his party than Donald Trump. And he issued a statement over the weekend that makes this very personal. He said, quote, "failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal." So in other words, Republicans vote against this at their political risk. And the big question is, if this bill does pass, does it turn out to be a political liability or a benefit for Republicans in the midterm elections?
The first tax bill Trump passed in his first term turned out to be very unpopular. Voters don't like the idea of giving big tax cuts to billionaires and cutting Medicaid, and that will be the Democrats' message. The Republicans will focus on the tax cuts going forward, and this is going to be a main issue in the midterm elections.
RASCOE: This time last week, much of this program was about the U.S. strikes on Iran. How much more do we know today about what exactly those attacks achieved?
LIASSON: Well, we have a lot of conflicting analyses. Trump says that the strikes completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program - set it back for years. He has support in that view from his own CIA and from an Israeli estimate. But a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report suggested that the program may only have been set back for months, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran could resume enrichment of uranium in a matter of months. So it's still unclear. The strikes certainly did a lot of damage - even the Iranians admit that. The question is, what is the lesson that the Iranians are going to take from this? Will they give up on getting a nuclear weapon - which is what Trump says they're going to do - or will their lesson be different, that they have to rush to get a nuclear weapon as soon as possible to avoid future strikes like this? After all, no one is bombing North Korea because they have a lot of nuclear weapons.
RASCOE: Well NATO had a summit in The Hague this past week, which the president attended. What stood out to you from that meeting in the Netherlands?
LIASSON: Well, it seemed like it was a complete turnaround in Trump's attitude towards NATO. He's had an ambivalent, if not hostile, relationship with NATO up until now. He's considered them freeloaders. He suggested many times that the U.S. might not honor Article 5, which says an attack on one is an attack on all. In other words, he might not come to the defense of NATO countries who are attacked. But in Europe, the NATO allies found a way to keep Trump in the fold, at least for now.
The first thing they did was substantive. They agreed to raise their defense spending to 5% of GDP, which is something that Trump had been demanding, so he gets credit for that. And they flattered him. They praised him. They said this never could have happened without him, and the Secretary General of NATO even called him Daddy. So he left the NATO meeting saying that he came in as if it was a chore, but he left feeling differently. He said NATO is not a rip-off, which is the opposite of what he's been calling them, and we will see if his new warm feelings toward the Western Alliance continue.
RASCOE: That's in NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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