Senate Republicans have expressed concerns over the House’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” aimed at tackling President Donald Trump’s wishes.
The Senate will change the bill.
Maybe Senate Republicans will add in more spending cuts! I’m not holding my breath, even though Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) wants it to happen:
The frequently cantankerous Wisconsin senator is pushing his fellow Republicans to deliver huge spending cuts as part of their party-line domestic policy bill — and vowing to block President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority if his demands, which are shared by a small cadre of fiscal hawks, aren’t met.As the megabill moves through the House, Johnson’s increasingly vocal warnings are an early indicator for Senate GOP leaders and the White House that they’ve got major headaches awaiting across the Capitol. Senate Republicans can only afford three defections on the expected party-line vote.“I think there’s enough of us that would say, ‘No, that’s not adequate,’” Johnson said in an interview where he described his insistence on returning the federal government to “pre-pandemic” level of spending.
The Republicans swore $2 trillion in cuts. Did anyone believe them? Not me.
Of course, they’re having problems hitting $1.5 trillion in cuts.
Johnson and other fiscal hawks in the Senate want it to go further than $2 trillion.
Johnson wants the Senate to perform an obviously important task: investigate the federal budget “line-by-line.” What a concept:
“Elon Musk is showing us how to do this right?” he said. “You expose, ‘Whoa, what are we doing spending money on that?’” he said.But Johnson hasn’t yet found buy-in for that idea from colleagues who have been burned by one too many deficit-cutting commissions that ultimately sputtered. The response he’s gotten, he said, is “we don’t have time to do it.”“Well, okay then, I don’t have the support for the bill,” Johnson said.
Johnson has another radical idea: break “up the bill into two or three or more pieces.”
But Johnson has been one of many to fall in line with the party. See, this is why George Washington pleaded with people not to form political parties!
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will likely side with Johnson. Here’s me:
Other GOP senators don’t like the bill, mainly with the Medicaid portion of the House bill…even though it pretty much only tightens who can receive it. You know, only American citizens.
The senators also have an issue with the bill limiting the “states’ flexibility to use health care provider taxes to increase the federal share of Medicaid spending — a strategy many states use to draw more Medicaid dollars from Washington.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said: “The provider tax in particular, that could have a big impact in my state and lead to reduced coverage, so I’ve got some concerns. I think we need to look really, really carefully at that. I continue to maintain my position we should not be cutting Medicaid benefits.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) will also pay close attention to the medical part:
Tillis says he’s open to scaling back some of the health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act that were increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal spending exploded. But he doesn’t want to cut the federal health care safety net to below where it was before the pandemic.“We just got to make sure that what we had pre-COVID as a safety net still exists and people have access [to health insurance] in the marketplace,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before, I think, the details are settled.”Tillis says he wants to dig in to the projection that more than 8 million people could lose their insurance.“We’re looking at that,” he said. “If it’s that many, we have to look at what’s happened — if that’s just the expansion population, if that’s work requirement.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY