North Korea Goes Ballistic

The Senate Budget committee voted to move forward on the Republican tax bill Tuesday afternoon, a small but substantial step forward for the GOP overhaul, which will now go before the full Senate for debate. “I think we're going to get it passed,” said President Donald Trump at a White House meeting with GOP congressional leadership, a few minutes after the bill passed out of committee. “I think it's going to pass. And it's going to be very popular.”

It now falls to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to thread the needle on a bill he needs 50 of the Senate’s 52 Republicans to support, a task he called “a challenging exercise.”

“Think of sitting there with a Rubik’s cube trying to get to 50,” McConnell said at his habitual Tuesday press conference. “We do have a few members who have concerns, and we’re trying to address them. We know we will not be able to move forward until we get 50 people satisfied.”

Trump, however, sounded confident even while acknowledging the bill will change before getting to his desk. “It's going to have lots of adjustments before it ends, but the end result will be a very, very massive—the largest in the history of our country—tax cut,” he said.

Trump travels to St. Louis on Wednesday for a speech touting tax reform.