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Hi, I’m George Gerbo and welcome to Washington Times Weekly, where we get a chance to sit down with our reporters and dig into their coverage of the latest news and events.
Joining me today is White House correspondent Kerry Pickett.
[GERBO] You’re doing a little bit of double duty going back and forth between the White House and Capitol Hill, which is what the negotiations have been over the past few weeks on this “big, beautiful bill,” as President Trump calls it. It has finally made its way and secured final passage in the House of Representatives, 215 to 214, after a lot of late-night wrangling and rules committee markups.
Speaker Mike Johnson has diligently shepherded this bill through. President Trump accused some members of Congress of grandstanding in holding up the process, but the Speaker and the Whip and his Republican leadership colleagues have finally shepherded this through to passage.
[PICKET] This was a bill that just eked by 215 to 214 on an early morning vote, but you had a lot of sleepy lawmakers who really just spent their entire night here on Capitol Hill. You had only two Republicans who voted against this bill, Congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and only one congressman that was Andy Harris, he’s the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, he voted present. All three were pretty much concerned about the measure’s impact on the deficit. Thomas Massie just slammed this bill as a “debt bomb ticking.”
Now, obviously, Thomas Massie is very consistent with how he looks at legislation like this. He’s pretty much a Libertarian and you’re going to hear the same thing coming from Rand Paul of Kentucky over in the Senate. He’s pretty much saying more or less the same thing, so he does not support the bill either. And we’ll see where he’s going to be going and how he describes the bill up in the upper chamber.
But right now, the CBO estimates that the bill adds about $3.8 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. So there’s going to be some fighting back and forth. The Senate obviously has a lot of ideas as to how they want to change the bill, as much as Trump is saying, “No, no, keep it, keep it as is.” That’s not how Congress works, especially with a budget reconciliation in the upper chamber — what that means is they’ll only have to pass this bill by a simple majority. They won’t need Democrats to help with this because usually they need 60 votes to end debate and then they can move on. No, they’ll only need a simple majority, but that also means they can’t lose three Republicans on this.
So they’re going to have to deal with people like Susan Collins, Rand Paul, Senator Josh Hawley, who says do not touch Medicaid. And so that is something that they’re gonna have to deal with.
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