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A Senate fiscal hawk doesn’t believe Republicans can hit their own self-imposed timeline to pass President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Senate Republicans are racing against the clock to finish work on their version of the president’s colossal bill after the House GOP advanced its offering late last month.
So far, each of the 10 Senate committees has unveiled a portion of the bill and are fine-tuning each chunk to conform with Senate rules and address concerns among varying factions in the conference.
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Republican leaders are gunning to put the package on the floor next week, ahead of a scheduled recess for Independence Day, but Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., believes there is enough resistance against the bill to torpedo that timeline.
“I think we have enough people that are saying, ‘No, we’re not going to proceed to the bill prior to July 4.’” he said. “We need more time, but I think our efforts now are concentrated.”
Johnson has long been pushing for far deeper cuts in the package, far beyond the goal of $1.5 trillion set in the House’s offering and the pursuit of $2 trillion in cuts in the Senate’s package to begin putting a major dent in the nation’s deficit.
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The lawmaker’s remarks came during a press call where he debuted his 31-page report on the GOP’s quest to ram the president’s agenda through Congress.
The report offered a variety of scenarios of the deficit and growth impacts the Republicans’ plan could have based on varying levels of compound annual growth rates that varied from over 2%, 3% and 4%.
The report was meant to be a thumb in the face of the Congressional Budget Office’s findings on the bill and overall state of federal spending and deficits. But it also rejected the arguments made by Republican leaders and the White House in its pursuit of showing the reality of the nation’s fiscal health and the effect the “big, beautiful bill” could have on it.
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Ron Johnson acknowledged the sentiments of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Trump that the spending cuts achieved in the House product were unprecedented but countered that “we’ve faced an unprecedented level of spending increase” since the pandemic.
“You can argue about the twigs and leaves on the forest floor, but I’m forcing everybody to take a step back and look at the look at the forest,” Ron Johnson said. “It’s blazing, and we got to put this forest fire out.”
There are others with varying concerns, including the addition of a debt-ceiling hike and proposed changes to Medicaid, who could form a multi-faceted coalition to tank the bill.
Thune can only afford to lose three votes if he hopes to pass the bill, given that the nature of the budget reconciliation process skirts the filibuster and that Democrats have been iced out of the process thus far.
Ron Johnson noted that he hoped Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., wouldn’t put the full bill on the floor next week because “I really think it’ll be voted down.”
“If we do vote it down, I don’t want anybody to interpret it as a slap in the face of either Leader Thune or President Trump,” Ron Johnson said. “It’s just saying, ‘Guys, we need more time. The ball has been in the Senate court for two weeks.”
Johnson has been a proponent of breaking up the megabill into two or three chunks, rather than tackling it all in “one fell swoop.” However, he acknowledged there would need to be some kind of mechanism that would allow lawmakers to have “at least two, if not three, bites at the apple.”
“I understand this process is to kind of jam everybody, but let’s not do what Nancy Pelosi did and say, ‘Hey, got to pass this bill to figure out what’s in it,’” he added. “Let’s know fully what’s in it. Let’s do as President Trump asked. … He wants the Senate to make a better bill.”
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