Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday criticized the House GOP’s recent sprawling package to enact President Trump’s tax priorities and cut spending, while swiping at his colleagues in the lower chamber for setting “the bar way too low” in their goal to generate savings.
“They just kept talking about $1.5 trillion. They set the bar way too low,” Johnson told reporters Thursday morning, while referring to the minimum amount of savings House Republicans were looking to secure as part of the package.
“The goal of the House effort has been to pass one big, beautiful bill. It’s rhetoric. It’s false advertising. The goal should have been reduce average annual deficits, so we have to focus on spending,” he said.
He was also asked by reporters about conservative holdouts on the House side who shared similar concerns about the deficit, only to eventually allow the bill to move forward after pressure from Trump.
“In the House, President Trump can threaten a primary, and those guys want to keep their seats. I understand the pressure,” he said. “Can’t pressure me that way.”
“I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging our children’s future. It’s wrong,” he said.
“We were $14 trillion in debt, now we’re $37 [trillion],” he said. “Have you been watching what the bond markets are doing in relation to the one big, beautiful bill? They’re not thinking it’s a very big, beautiful bill.”
The cost of extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts — a cornerstone of the legislative package — along with measures to nix taxes on tips and overtime pay, is estimated to add trillions of dollars to the nation’s deficits over the next decade.
Accompanying the tax cuts, House Republicans have crafted a suite of proposals seeking to cut federal spending by well more than a $1 trillion in the coming years, with reforms to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program expected to account for a chunk of those savings.
Many House Republicans have promoted the tax cuts as progrowth while arguing part of the tax proposals will pay for themselves. But estimates from federal budget analysts have found the bill would add more than $2 trillion to the nation’s deficits, not factoring recent changes made this week. Other estimates from nonpartisan think tanks have projected even higher price tags.
The White House has claimed the bill will not add to the deficit, and Republicans have sought to discredit estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) about the bill’s costs. However, some conservatives are saying more action is needed to lower the nation’s deficits in the coming years, citing the country’s $36 trillion-plus debt.
“Everybody likes the tax cut, but when you’re $37 trillion in debt on the path to over $60 trillion in debt, right, when the Social Security Trust Fund is running out, somebody’s got to be the dad that says, ‘I know everybody wants to go to Disney World, but we just can’t afford it,’” Johnson said Thursday.
“So, I guess, I guess that’s what’s going to have to happen here in the Senate.”
Trump has pressed the Senate to move quickly on the bill, particularly as Congress stares down a midsummer deadline to pass legislation to raise the debt ceiling to prevent a national default.
The bill would allow for a $4 trillion increase to the debt ceiling, which caps how much money the Treasury Department can owe to pay the country’s bills. Some Republicans have pushed for a higher limit to prevent a potential debt limit showdown with Democrats ahead of next year’s midterms, while other conservatives have pushed for lower.
“I’d increase the debt ceiling up to a point to give us time to focus on another big, beautiful bill,” Johnson said, later proposing the debt ceiling should be increased “just enough to put pressure on the fact that we got to get back here and do the hard work, the line-by-line in the first package.”
“We’ll never get to a prepandemic-level spending in one big, beautiful bill. The House just proved that,” he said.
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