Republicans Lack the Votes In the Senate to Pass Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ Sen. Ron Johnson Warns; Inside House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ‘tooth and nail’ Fight to Pass Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ bill

Republicans lack the votes in the Senate to pass Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ Sen. Ron Johnson warns:

Republicans lack the necessary support in the Senate to get President Trump’s marquee One Big Beautiful Bill Act over the finish line in its current form, Sen. Ron Johnson warned.

Johnson (R-Wis.) has been one of the most outspoken critics of the megabill’s impact on deficits alongside Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and has vowed to oppose it in its current shape, regardless of pressure from Trump.

“We have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Johnson told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

Last Thursday, House Republicans, who have a razor-thin majority and are notoriously fragmented as well as rambunctious, narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act after months of deliberations.

The mammoth legislation features an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, bolstered border security, beefed up defense, energy reforms and a slew of conservative wishlist items.

But now it must clear the Senate, which has a 53-47 Republican to Democrat majority. The Wisconsin senator warned that he is far from alone in opposing the measure due to its increase in deficits.

If it becomes law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could add $3.1 trillion to the debt to the deficit over a 10-year period, according to an assessment from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) argued that the deficit impact has been “dramatically overstated” and praised the roughly $1.5 trillion in cuts included in the massive bill.

“The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] has been panned because, as you said, they don’t do dynamic scoring,” the speaker told “State of the Union.” “They don’t account for the growth that will be fostered by all the policies.” —>READ MORE HERE

Inside House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ‘tooth and nail’ fight to pass Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ bill:

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to bring in the big gun last week — President Trump — to pressure House Republican holdouts into passing one of the largest tax cuts in US history.

“There were many points in the final couple of weeks where the entire thing appeared that it would fall apart,” Johnson told The Post in a phone interview Friday, before touting Trump’s influence.

“He’s the ultimate dealmaker. He literally wrote the book on it. So when he speaks, people listen, and that’s been a great benefit to us.”

The nearly $4 trillion budget reconciliation package — which will avoid a massive tax hike next January and make Trump’s 2017 individual rate cuts permanent if passed in the Senate — was the culmination of a year’s work with 11 committee chairs but wrapped up in the last 48 hours before a vote following high-stakes, round-the-clock negotiations with the Republican conference’s so-called “Five Families.”

“I think it was Vince Lombardi that said, ‘Victory loves preparation,’ right?” Johnson paraphrased. “It required a long thoughtful plan, and that’s what we did.”

Deals struck with blue-state Republicans for a $40,000 state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, a White House showdown with fiscal hardliners in the Freedom Caucus and a final agreement implementing rescissions of green-energy tax credits and new work requirements for Medicaid helped the speaker send the legislation to the Senate.

Sources with direct knowledge of the 11th-hour White House and speaker’s office meetings before the changes said Trump’s “colorful” rhetoric was key, with one noting how holdouts recognized “the gravity of that moment when the most powerful man on the planet knows you’re the problem.”

“Don’t blow this opportunity,” the president fumed in the meeting held in the cabinet room of the executive mansion. “Get it done.”

Johnson and he deployed something of a good cop-bad cop dynamic initially, though the speaker became far more “forceful” in the hours before the final vote, with one source saying it became “very clear early on that the time for negotiation was over.”

“I know about their districts to a granular level,” the speaker said Friday of his colleagues, adding in his understated way: “It was certainly a dialogue.”

The “tooth-and-nail fight,” as one source put it, came after the initial budget blueprint didn’t account for potentially costly expansions to Medicaid in states and failed to chip away at hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for solar and wind items approved under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. —>READ MORE HERE

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