House Speaker Mike Johnson is urging GOP senators to exercise caution in making changes to the sweeping megabill passed through the House last week.
“I encourage them to do their work, of course, as we all anticipate,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday on “State of the Union.” “But to make as few modifications to this package as possible, because remembering that we’ve got to pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House. And I have a very delicate balance here, very delicate equilibrium that we’ve reached over a long period of time. And it’s best not to meddle with it too much.”
Jamming the megabill through the House the first time was a Herculean task for Johnson and his allies in leadership. It required a visit from President Donald Trump to the Capitol and careful negotiating by the speaker to bring the chamber’s many coalitions aboard. Doing it a second time — with major changes from the Senate side — could prove impossible.
But key senators are already looking to make modifications, with different factions holding that the bill goes too far in its approach to Medicaid and clean-energy tax credit cuts. Others, such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), say it doesn’t move the ball far enough. Johnson wants to cut spending by roughly $6 trillion.
“This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,” Ron Johnson told Tapper, also on Sunday. “And again, I think you can do it in the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn’t even notice. But you have to do the work, which takes time.”
“The problem is the math doesn’t add up,” Paul told host Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “They’re going to explode the debt by the House says $4 trillion, the Senate’s actually been talking about exploding the debt $5 trillion.”
The speaker pointed to Republicans’ tiny majority in the House, with margins that may make sweeping changes unrealistic.
“And I just encourage Ron to remember, you know, in the House, we have 220 Republicans, a wide range of perspectives and a wide range of districts represented,” Johnson told Tapper. “And I’ve got to get to 217 votes to get this thing over the line. So as much as we can in as big increment as we can, I think we’ve achieved that here. And I just want them to remember that we’ve got to deal within the realm of what’s possible.”
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