By Family Research Council
When Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) hauled the “one, big, beautiful bill” over its first mountain — House passage — he had one request. To the GOP senators, he said, “I encourage them to modify the package that we’re sending over there as little as possible.” Thinking back over the warring factions in his chamber, he added, “Because we have to maintain that balance, and it’s a very delicate thing.” But in the days since last Thursday, it’s not clear if any Republicans, including the one in the White House, are listening.
Watching the House from a safe distance through its long nights, tense meetings, mark-ups, and ferocious jockeying for different priorities, senators sent a steady drip of commentary to the press about what they would change and language they thought could go farther. Now that the bill sits squarely in their laps, some have signaled at choppy waters ahead. While almost everyone is complimentary of the job the speaker has done, they also recognize that this is their chance to put a different mark on Donald Trump’s signature legislation.
“I want to get a deal done,” Florida Senator Rick Scott (R) insisted. “I support the president’s agenda. I support the border, I support the military, I support extending the Trump tax cuts … But [we’ve] got to live in reality here: [We’ve] got a fiscal crisis.”
Others, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul (R), have been more critical. For weeks, he’s tried to rally the troops to cut more spending. “… [T]he math doesn’t add up,” the chamber’s outspoken fiscal hawk warned. “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.” Surely, he persisted, “there’s got to be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong and deficits are wrong and wants to go in the other direction,” he said.
Johnson took the disapproval in stride. “I agree wholeheartedly with what my dear friend, Rand Paul, said. I love his conviction, and I share it,” he told Fox News’s Shannon Bream. “The national debt is … the greatest threat to our national security, and deficits are a serious problem,” the speaker said. “What I think Rand is missing on this one is the fact that we are quite serious about this,” the Louisianan emphasized. “This is the biggest spending cut in more than 30 years.”
The fault-finding isn’t a surprise. The speaker endured plenty of it from his own House circles, including perpetual nitpicker Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) who called the House package “a debt bomb ticking” before voting against it. Even the Senate’s Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argued that the “number one goal of this reconciliation ought to be to reduce that 10-year and those annual deficits, not increase them.”
Sitting down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins for “This Week on Capitol Hill,” the speaker was asked about the party’s concerns. Republicans say it “doesn’t go far enough,” Perkins prodded before asking for Johnson’s response.
A beat passed, and the speaker replied, “It took us many decades to get the country into the financial mess we’re in. We cannot flip a switch and fix it overnight, but,” he paused, “we have a responsibility to get us to begin to steer out of the debt crisis. This bill is truly historic in its scope and what it does for the first time in history.” Johnson continued, “This legislation is written so that we save $1.9 trillion with a ‘T’ in taxpayer funds. There’s never been anything like that. It’s twice as much as the last time Congress even attempted such a thing, which is more than 30 years ago. So truly historic in turning the aircraft carrier and beginning us on a new trajectory,” the speaker said, referring to his oft-invoked metaphor.
To those like Paul who complain that the debt ceiling hike only enables more spending, Johnson is emphatic. “We’re going to extend the debt limit — not because we’re going to spend more money, but because you have to do that to show the bond markets and the rest of the world that America is good on its debts. That must be done. Everybody knows that.” He invoked the White House. “President Trump is insistent about it. He says we’re not raising a ceiling to spend it. We’re extending the deadline so that we can get our fiscal house in order. This is a really important thing.”
And while the president has been enthusiastic about the House’s package, he created plenty of heartburn Sunday evening when he seemed to imply that the upper chamber should have its way with the legislation. “I want the Senate and the senators to make the changes they want,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “It will go back to the House, and we’ll see if we can get them. In some cases, the changes may be something I’d agree with, to be honest.” Hinting at conversations he’s probably had with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), the president acknowledged there would be changes. “Some will be minor, some will be fairly significant.”
Reminded that the goal is to get the bill to his desk by July 4, Trump nodded. “I think it’s going to get there,” adding that Johnson and Thune “have done a fantastic job.”
While the two sides gather their energy for the reconciliation fight’s next round, the speaker has spent his time hammering away at the disinformation Democrats keep spewing about the bill’s supposed fallout. Repeating what he’s said a hundred times in a hundred different ways, Johnson reiterated, “We are not cutting Medicaid in this package. There’s a lot of [dishonesty] out there about this.” Pointing to one of the most outrageous examples of fraud, waste, and abuse, he quantified a problem that many suspected but didn’t have hard numbers on.
“[We’ve] got more than 1.4 million illegal aliens on Medicaid,” the speaker warned. “Medicaid is not intended for non-U.S. citizens. It’s intended for the most vulnerable populations of Americans, which is pregnant women and young single mothers, the disabled, the elderly. They are protected in what we’re doing, because we’re preserving the resources for those who need it most.” Then he put the spotlight on the other problem, the legal, work-capable citizens who were added to the rolls under Joe Biden. “You’re talking about 4.8 million able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can. That is called fraud. They are cheating the system. When you root out those kinds of abuses,” he stressed, “you save the resources that are so desperately needed by the people who deserve it and need it most. That’s what we’re doing.”
And it’s not just the Medicaid soundbites they’ll have to confront but the headlines about the proposal’s “score,” as in how much the government’s financial experts at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) believe it will add to the deficit. But, as the Louisiana leader cautioned, there’s almost always more to that than meets the eye. “The last time they scored a big bill like this was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the first Trump administration,” he explained to Perkins. “They were $1 trillion off in their calculations.”
To put the process into perspective, he noted that “the CBO is run by Democrats,” adding that “84% of the employees there who are crunching the numbers are donors to big Democrats like [Massachusetts Senator] Elizabeth Warren and [Senator] Bernie Sanders. So we dismiss that,” the speaker said. “What they do not count for is the pro-growth policies in this bill that [are] going to grow the U.S. economy. And that is how, in combination with savings, we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess.”
Still, Johnson underscored, as he has so many times, “We value everybody’s opinion. … You know, my background is in constitutional law. I’m a student of what the Founders originally intended for how the process was supposed to work. The United States Congress is the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. It works so well, but only if it’s done as designed.” He thought back on his predecessors and other leaders who drafted major legislation “in a back room, by quite literally a handful of people. I didn’t want to do that, because I think we’ve got to get back to what was intended.” Everyone should have a voice, he insisted. Does that take longer? Absolutely. Is it more painful? His chamber just proved it was. “But it’s always worth it in the end … and it makes a better product.”
What will happen to the 1,100 pages he poured over for months? The speaker doesn’t know. But there’s one tool he’d suggest for everyone facing these big obstacles: “prayer.” “It’s not been in vogue in Washington for quite some time,” Johnson reflected, “and I’m just bringing it back. It seems like some huge innovation, but that’s exactly how our nation began. And I think we do well to remember it.”
AUTHOR
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.
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