Defying the laws of political gravity, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrangled a razor-thin Republican majority to pass the president’s “one big, beautiful bill” by a single-vote margin. The 215-214 score included most House Republicans, ranging from the SALT RINOs, or Republicans in name only, representing blue state districts to Freedom Caucus fiscal hawks.
The outcome was enabled by the macabre misfortune of three House Democrats dying since the 119th Congress opened on Jan. 3. Johnson fulfilled his promise that by Memorial Day, the House would do its part to cement President Donald Trump‘s legacy. The speaker has left Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) more than a month to deliver his chamber’s version of the reconciliation bill by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent‘s deadline of July 4.
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But the rest of Thune’s Senate Republican Conference seems to have other ideas.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said the Senate “will basically write its own version of this bill,” eliminating all of its long overdue Medicaid reforms, which would slash the deficit by a projected minimum of nearly $800 billion over the decade. On the actual conservative side of the conference, a pair of fiscal hawks, Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rick Scott (R-FL), said they would vote against the current bill if it didn’t achieve further deficit reduction. But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) conceded the quiet part out loud: dissenters aren’t just trying to improve upon the current bill. Rather, the Wisconsin senator gloated that he had “enough” votes to kill it entirely.
Not all the Senate critics of the bill are entirely wrong. Unlike in the House, where a significant minority of Republicans hail from high-tax blue states, Senate Republicans are correct that they have neither the political nor principled incentive to maintain the quadrupling of the state and local tax deduction cap, when reducing it back to the $10,000 level originally established by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would save hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade.
And Scott is correct that the legislation ought to eliminate former President Joe Biden‘s green energy handouts from the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act. Unlike the version passed by the House, the Senate’s iteration should eliminate the “Green New Scam” immediately.
But while Ron Johnson’s concerns about the price tag are valid, methinks his primary grievance with the bill is offense at the single-bill procedure that sidelined the Senate’s pie-in-the-sky ambitions of crafting multiple piecemeal bills, which a three-seat margin in the House and the Senate would somehow be able to pass before the New Year’s Day expiration date.
Recall that the longer Republicans go without renewing those expiring provisions of the TCJA and the closer they get to the “X-date” — that is, when the Treasury runs out of cash to pay federal obligations, which Bessent estimated is sometime in August — the more leverage Democrats have to water down the “one big, beautiful bill,” thus running the risk of an insertion of a poison pill that kills it altogether.
Savings through Medicaid reform
As the Washington Examiner editorial board has recommended, the Senate can and should ensure that Medicaid spends seven times more on able-bodied adults covered by the Obamacare expansion than on the least-privileged patients — the disabled, children, and impoverished mothers — originally intended as Medicaid’s beneficiaries. This would save $720 billion across the decade, while banning noncitizens from all means-tested welfare would save another $461 trillion.
Just the fixes included in this column could reduce the bill’s estimated cost of $2.5 trillion over 10 years to nearly zero. And even if House RINOs make a fuss, Senate conservatives would have the president’s bully pulpit as the enforcer to help get the entire party into line.
PERMANENT LOW RATES WOULD GIVE GOP EDGE IN TAX WARS
But the Senate has no time to spare and no political margin to allow it to engage in the pipe dream of passing three new bills from scratch after wasting months of letting House leadership do the hard work of crafting a messy but ultimately passable bill. Failure to pass an increase to the debt ceiling before the X-date means Uncle Sam would have to default on our $36 trillion national debt for the first time in U.S. history.
Failure to include the debt ceiling increase in the “one big, beautiful bill” — what Johnson wants — means the bill would likely never get passed. If the bill doesn’t get passed, the expiration of the bulk of Trump’s first-term legislation would mean every Republican in the United States would head into the 2026 elections with the average U.S. household receiving a 22% tax hike, and nobody but the Republican Party to thank.