Donald Trump has been adamant that he wants that big, beautiful bill on his desk for his signature by July 4.
With the party still fighting over key details of the bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) believes July 4 will come and go with no bill for Trump to sign.
First and foremost, that legislation needs to make it out of the Senate before it goes back to the House for a vote after any changes are made.
Right now, that is going to be a problem because the GOP still does not have enough support in the Senate to get the bill over the finish line.
In addition to the usual resistance, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says the party needs to take a hard look at why we continue to spiral into debt. He stated, “You have to admit you have a problem, you have to properly define it, try to look at the root causes."
Johnson added, “It starts there, and we haven’t done that yet.”
Even if the bill does get through the Senate, there are members of the Freedom Caucus in the House who will not sign the bill with the changes made by the Senate.
Among them is Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who believes the changes have the party backsliding into previous spending habits.
He stated, “The message we’re delivering back -- both to Senate leadership and to Senate conservatives -- that they’re not getting the job done in terms of terminating the ‘Green New Scam’ subsidies, or frankly going far enough on Medicaid."
Roy added, “I have said publicly, and I’m speaking for Chip Roy here -- not anyone else -- but I think there are some like-minded individuals that are not going to vote for a bill that does that. It is definitively dead if it were to come over to the House in anything resembling its current form: the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] provisions, the ‘deficit damage,’ some of the other policy changes that we think are concerning.”
Thune knows that it is not worth sending a bill to the House that will be rejected. To that point, he seems to think the idea of the bill making it to Trump’s desk by July 4 is a fantasy.
He stated, "I think we have enough people that are saying, ‘No, we're not going to proceed to the bill prior to July 4.’ We need more time, but I think our efforts now are concentrated."
Johnson added, "You can argue about the twigs and leaves on the forest floor, but I'm forcing everybody to take a step back and look at the look at the forest. It's blazing, and we got to put this forest fire out."
I love the fact people are pushing back against all that spending, but there is a real issue with how Congress runs this. It seems as though every time we have a spending bill coming up, they wait until the last second. And here we are again, with members of Congress traveling all over the place, doing media, having podcasts, when they need to be in DC hammering out all the details of this bill. These people have no idea how to properly run a business, and make no mistake about it, this budget work is exactly like running a major corporation, only the people in charge are clueless.
