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EXCLUSIVE — One of the leading opponents of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” declared not even the commander in chief will be able to deter him from speaking out against what he sees as a bill that falls short of Republicans’ goal of cutting government waste.
“It’ll completely backfire on him,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital of any attempts by Trump to sway him on the current legislation.
Johnson has become a prominent voice of opposition against the House GOP’s offering to the budget reconciliation process. Senate Republicans finally began the tedious process of parsing through the bill this week.
Lawmakers in the upper chamber, Johnson included, are determined to make changes to the bill, with most wanting to make reductions to Medicaid and food stamps more palatable. Trump has made it clear his bill must pass but has acknowledged the Senate will need to make a few changes.
Trump’s directive has been to deliver a bill that can survive the razor-thin majorities in both chambers.
Johnson, however, wants to see spending returned to pre-pandemic levels, cuts that are trillions of dollars deeper than what House Republicans could stomach. And he is ready to vote against the bill unless he sees the changes he wants.
And he believes that a pressure campaign from the president against him and other like-minded fiscal hawks will fail.
He said a better approach would be to work with lawmakers and fiscal hawks like him to gain a better understanding of the reality of the country’s fiscal situation, a reality that “is grim,” he said.
Johnson has been up front about his disdain for the bill but has so far avoided public retribution from Trump. In fact, the two have spoken twice this week, once on Monday and later during a Senate Finance Committee meeting at the White House Tuesday.
The lawmaker has told Trump he’s in Trump’s corner and that he wants “to see you succeed,” but he has been steadfast in his position that the bill does not go far enough to tackle the national debt.
And the debt continues to climb, nearing $37 trillion and counting, according to Fox News’ National Debt Tracker.
The House’s offering set a goal of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, which lawmakers in the lower chamber have pitched as a positive step forward to righting the country’s fiscal ship, an offering Johnson panned as falling drastically short of the GOP’s promises to cut deep into government spending.
“What’s so disappointing about what happened in the House is it was all rhetoric. It’s all slogans,” Johnson said. “They picked a number. Literally, they picked a number out of the air.”
Johnson views this attempt at the budget reconciliation process as a rare opportunity to “do the hard things” when it comes to spending cuts, but others in the GOP have been more hesitant to cut as deep.
Johnson said a main reason Republicans have so far fallen short of meeting the moment for the most part is that lawmakers don’t understand just how much the federal government shovels out the door year in and year out.
The lawmaker recalled a moment roughly three years ago during a debate over another year-end omnibus spending bill, when each of the dozen appropriations bills is crammed into one, bloated package that is universally reviled and almost always passes.
He asked his colleagues if they really knew just how much the government spends, and no one “volunteered to answer.”
“Nobody knew. I mean, think of that. The largest financier in the world. We’re supposedly, in theory, the 535 members of the board of directors, and nobody knew,” he said. “Why would they? We never talked about it.”
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Johnson has been busy trying to better educate his colleagues, putting together his own charts and graphs that cut out the “noise,” like the latest nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report that found the legislation would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over a decade. The GOP has universally panned that projection.
“We can’t accept this as a new normal,” Johnson said. “We can’t accept — you can take pot shots of CBO, but you can’t deny that reality. [It] might be off a little bit, but that is the trajectory, and that’s undeniable.”
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