Republicans were able to drag President Donald Trump’s bill tackling his domestic agenda across the finish line in the House, but the “one big, beautiful bill” faces landmines in the Senate.
“I know everybody wants to go to Disney World, but we just can’t afford it,” claimed Senator Ron Johnson.
GOP leaders expect there to be changes to the legislation when it hits the Senate. That’s the nature of the beast, but the substantial rewrites some senators are calling for could pose dramatic challenges for party leaders after the legislation squeaked through by just one vote in the House.
Senator Johnson took serious issue with the House bill for massively increasing the deficit. He called the bill’s impact “completely unacceptable.”
“The goal of the House effort has been to pass a ‘one big, beautiful bill.’ It’s rhetoric. It’s false advertising,” he insisted. “The goal should have been to reduce average annual deficits, so we have to focus on spending.”
Johnson said the Senate needs to break the bill into two and go through the spending line by line to make cuts.
The Wisconsin senator said he believes he has three other senators who would help him force the bill in the direction he wants. Republicans have a 53-seat majority in the Senate, so four GOP “no” votes would sink the bill.
In the House, Trump was able to bully several right-wing members to get in line, but it’s a different case in the Senate.
“In the House, President Trump can threaten a primary, and those guys want to keep their seats. I understand the pressure,” Johnson said. “Can’t pressure me that way.”
“I think there’s nothing conservative about having deficits of $2 trillion a year,” said Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, another critic of the House bill.
The current package raises the debt limit by $4 trillion. Congress needs to take action by this summer to avoid the U.S. defaulting on its debt, but Paul said that’s a nonstarter. He appears likely to be a Republican “no” vote in the Senate, no matter what other changes are made.
“I’ve told them I’ll consider voting if they’ll take the debt ceiling off of it,” Paul said.
Florida Senator Rick Scott also blasted the U.S. running $2 trillion deficits and said his goal is to use the bill to balance the budget.
“We have to get our fiscal house in order. We have no choice,” he claimed.
Among items in the House bill that Scott took issue with was increasing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, a move that was included in the House bill to get moderates onboard. He was one of several GOP senators to reject including it as the Senate prepares to debate the legislation.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said this week the issue in the senate will be whether the package has “sufficient spending reforms to get us on a more sustainable fiscal path.” He suggested there would be tweaks to the tax provisions and the timeline of provisions expiring, but it was clear his caucus has potentially grander plans.
Senator Josh Hawley has been an outspoken critic of efforts to cut Medicaid. The bill that passed through the House would result in millions of Americans losing coverage.
Asked if he found the House bill acceptable on Medicaid, Hawley expressed confidence there would be changes in the Senate. He said he spoke with Trump Wednesday night, but some of his goals for the legislation could be hard to square with hard-liner House members.
“We want to make sure we get Medicaid right, no Medicaid benefit cuts. We want to make sure that we get no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. I hope we can do a little bit more on the child tax credit,” Hawley said.
“My message to my colleagues is we’ve got to deliver actual tax relief to working class people, and just extending the tax cuts from 2017 is fine, but that’s no new tax relief to working people,” he said.
West Virginia Senator Jim Justice had similar hopes in mind. The current provisions for tax exemptions on tips and overtime are set to expire in the House bill just as Trump wraps up his second term.
“I’d love for that to be permanent,” Justice said. “With the tips and with the overtime stuff, sure, they cost some money, but at the same time, really and truly, what we’re doing is spending some dollars to make $5.”
The post Trump Bill Attacked as ‘Disney World’ America Cannot Afford appeared first on The Daily Beast.
