While House Republicans celebrated passing the president’s “big, beautiful” spending bill by a one-vote margin Thursday, caucus members in the upper chamber remained unimpressed.
Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju later that day, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham shot down some of the cuts as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.
Even a $880 billion cut into Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.
America’s national deficit is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.
“Some of the Freedom Caucus members are warning you guys not to water down any of their cuts, what do you say to them?” Raju asked.
Graham could only laugh.
“Well, you had your chance,” the lawmaker said with a chuckle. “Some of these cuts are not real. And we’re talking about over a decade—you know, if you do a trillion and a half, that’s like a percent and a half.”
“So don’t get high on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending because we didn’t,” Graham noted.
Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.
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