After the House passed President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, lawmakers promptly went on vacation for a week. Most senators, up until that point, had done little tracking of the legislation given the last-minute changes being made. Several now say they don’t like what they see, and their complaints will be plastered on every letterhead and cable news chyron for several weeks.
Welcome to Washington, where the clock is ticking to get the bill done before the debt limit breach date. Secretary Bessent says that the deadline will come at some point in mid-July. If no grand bargain can be on this Big Beautiful Bill by that time, then the wind will come out of the legislation’s sails, Republicans will be forced to strike a compromise with Democrats, and, more likely than not, Congress will head into the six-week August recess with nothing to show for six months of work.
Over the week-long Memorial Day recess, a handful of senators began voicing concerns about the bill, most notably Senator Johnson. A true Tea Party believer elected to the Senate in 2010 having never previously held office, Mr. Johnson is one of Mr. Trump’s biggest cheerleaders on Capitol Hill.
Not on this piece of legislation, however. In recent days, he has said he wants to see at least a return to pre-pandemic levels of spending, which is a far cry from the current House version that cuts a mere $1.6 trillion over the course of a decade.
“You go line-by-line,” Mr. Johnson told Fox Business on Sunday morning, saying that a special committee needs to be set up to go through this process. “We are facing a moment here where we’ve had an unprecedented level of spending increase — 58 percent — to over $7 trillion.”
Mr. Johnson, who is chairman of a subcommittee in the Senate, says he himself will host a hearing on government spending after he compiles his own report on the bill’s “facts and figures” is released. Other debt hawks and conservatives have said the same about the bill. Senator Lee says he is currently a no on the bill. Senator Rick Scott told radio host John Catsimatidis’ “Cats Roundtable.”
“I’m 100 percent focused on getting the president’s agenda done,” Mr. Scott said. “But what we also have to do is we have to bring some more fiscal sanity to the table here.” Added he: “We’re running over a trillion dollars a year of interest expense. If we leave it just the way it is, we’re gonna be close to $60 trillion worth of debt in ten years We’ll never be able to pay anything else we care about.”
Senator Paul had similar complaints about the bill, though he says that his real problem is an increase in funding for the “military industrial complex.”
“The math doesn’t really add up,” Mr. Paul told “Face the Nation” on Sunday, complaining about spending hikes for the military and the border wall.
“I think there are four of us at this point,” the Kentucky senator said, referring to the requisite number of “no” votes it would take to kill the bill in the Senate. He also said he wants to see the $5 trillion increase in the debt limit stripped from the bill, which is currently included and will likely keep America away from a default for the next two years.
“I want to vote for it. … But at the same time, I don’t want to raise the debt ceiling [by] $5 trillion,” Mr. Paul said. “If you take the debt ceiling off the bill, in all likelihood, I can vote for what the agreement is on the rest of the bill. It doesn’t have to be perfect to my liking.”
Despite his conservative detractors, Mr. Trump himself has only gone after Mr. Paul for his current opposition to the bill. In a Saturday Truth Social post, Mr. Trump said Mr. Paul “will be playing right into the hands of the Democrats, and the GREAT people of Kentucky will never forgive him” if he votes no.
The president’s ire may soon spread to other Republicans, however, if this bill fails to start moving through the process in a significant way within the next two weeks. Just last weekend, the president embraced the possibility of “significant changes” being made to his prized piece of legislation.
“I want the Senate and the senators to … make the changes they want,” the president said just seven days ago.
