President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator said there’s enough resistance to halt the bill unless there are significant changes.
“The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, urging deeper spending cuts than those in the bill to reset to a “reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending.”
“I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Johnson said.
Republicans are using a budgeting tactic called reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority to pass, to get the package through both chambers and to Trump’s desk. But any changes in the Senate would require the bill to go back to the House, where it was passed by only one vote among a divided Republican conference last week.
Speaker Johnson made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows this week to defend the bill and to encourage the Senate to pass it without too many changes.
“I encourage them, you know, to do their work, of course, as we all anticipate. But to make as few modifications to this package as possible, because remembering that we’ve got to pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House,” Johnson told “State of the Union.” “And I have a very delicate balance here, very delicate equilibrium that we’ve reached over a long period of time. And it’s best not to meddle with it too much.”
The speaker emphasized the need to expedite the bill’s passage and expressed hope that the president could sign it by Independence Day.
“Why is that so important? Because we’ve got to get relief to the American people, and that we also need to, for political purposes, show give a lot of time, enough time for everyone to see that this package actually is what we say. It’s going to help the country, it’s going to help the economy,” he said.
But Sen. Johnson criticized the rushed process, saying, “You have to do the work, which takes time. That’s part of the problem. The problem here is we’ve rushed this process. We haven’t taken the time. We’ve done the same old way, exempted most programs.”
Another issue with the bill in the Senate is that it raises the debt ceiling, which some GOP senators said they wanted to deal with separately rather than add it to the package that cuts spending and makes Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul told “Fox News Sunday” that he won’t vote for the legislation unless the debt ceiling increase is stripped because he said it would “explode deficits.”
He called the bill’s spending cuts “wimpy and anemic.”
“The problem is the math doesn’t add up,” he said.
Asked about Paul’s criticism during an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Speaker Johnson was asked whether he believes the legislation is an “economic gamble.”
“No, it’s not an economic gamble. It’s a big investment” Johnson said. “What this bill is going to do is be jet fuel to the U.S. economy, foster a pro-growth economy. What do we mean by that? We reduce taxes, reduce regulations. We will increase and incentivize American manufacturing. The effect it will have on the economy is that entrepreneurs and risk takers and job creators will have an easier time in doing that. They will allow for more jobs and more opportunity for people ad wages will increase.”
Johnson said criticism about rising debt is “dramatically overstated.”
“Those same groups can objectively see and acknowledge that this is the largest cut in spending in at least 30 years, and arguably of all time, we’re cutting over $1.5 trillion in federal spending while we check all the boxes and bring about a pro-growth economy,” he said.
And while the Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill would raise the deficit by $3.8 trillion, Speaker Johnson said because the CBO doesn’t do dynamic scoring, “they don’t account for the growth that will be fostered by all the policies that are in this, this, this big piece of legislation.”
In addition to extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts , the bill boosts spending for the military and border security and makes some cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other assistance programs.
The CBO’s preliminary analysis of the bill, requested by House Democrats and completed before it was passed by the House, estimated the lowest-income Americans will see their resources decrease while the country’s highest earners would see an increase.
The bill would implement new work requirements for Medicaid — targeting able-bodied adults and immigrants, among other beneficiaries – and incentivize states to not expand Medicaid. The CBO estimated it would result in $698 billion less in federal subsidies because of changes to the Medicaid program.
The early CBO estimates put the number of people who could lose coverage at more than 8 million — but that number continues to fluctuate and the CBO has not yet released its final score of the GOP bill as it continues to be negotiated.
Johnson and Trump have maintained that the bill does not cut Medicaid but does root out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“We are not cutting Medicaid in this package,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about this, Jake. The numbers of Americans who are affected are those that are entwined in our work to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse.”
“You’re talking about 4.8 million able bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can. That is called fraud. They are cheating the system. When you root out those kinds of abuses, you save the resources that are so desperately needed by the people who deserve it and need it most. That’s what we’re doing, and that’s why this is a morality of what we’re doing here is precisely right,” he said.
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