President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are pretty hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator is like, “Hold up, y’all.” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., was all like, “The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases,” when he talked to CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. He’s all about deeper spending cuts than what’s in the bill to reset to a “reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending.”
Reconciliation, a budgeting tactic that only needs a simple majority to pass, is what Republicans are using to push the package through both chambers and to Trump’s desk. But hey, any changes in the Senate would mean the bill has to go back to the House, where it barely passed by just one vote among a divided Republican conference last week. Talk about drama, right?
Speaker Johnson is out here making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to back up the bill and to push the Senate to pass it without too many changes. He’s all like, “Make as few modifications to this package as possible, okay? We’ve gotta pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House.” It’s all about maintaining that delicate balance, that equilibrium, you know? So let’s not mess with it too much, Johnson told “State of the Union.” The speaker is all about expediting the bill’s passage and hoping that Trump can sign it by Independence Day. Sounds like a plan, right? But hold on a sec, Sen. Johnson thinks the process is being rushed. He’s like, “You gotta put in the work, which takes time. Rushing things is a problem. We haven’t taken the time we need. We’re doing things the old way, exempting most programs.”
