Senator Ron Johnson on the Senate showdown over Trump's Big Beautiful Bill | All-In Interview

**Ron Johnson** (0:00)
Power corrupts. Government is power, and it's been corrupting. Nobody knew in total how much we spend, because we never even talk about it. The first goal of this Republican budget reconciliation should be, don't add to the deficit. I voted for President Trump, because I wanted him to defeat the deep state. You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels. Our base is going to go, why did we elect you guys? You're really no better than Democrats. I don't think President Trump is not focused on reducing spending. This is our one opportunity. And right now we're blowing. And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure we don't blow it. I can't be pressured by President Trump. He's willing to sit down with me, look at the numbers, acknowledge them, working forward in a reasonable plan forward. That's the only way he's going to get my support.

**Jason** (0:47)
So everyone has assumed that the House passage of the reconciliation bill is going to go to the Senate with some minor changes and then make its way to President Trump's desk for signing. But that may not be the case. There are several hardliners in the US. Senate who have made it very clear that the budget and the fiscal deficit problems that arise from this bill are insurmountable and they're going to take a very hard stance on voting no on this bill. Taking the lead on that point of view, Senator Johnson from Wisconsin, who's going to join us today for an emergency pod to talk about what's next with the Senate review of the reconciliation bill, what his thoughts are, what's the future of the republic, and what's ahead. We're really excited for this emergency pod. Thank you for joining us.

**Friedberg** (1:41)
We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion.

**Jason** (1:44)
What did you guys think? That was fun. Senator, thanks for joining Chamath and I for this conversation this morning.

**Ron Johnson** (1:52)
Good morning, guys. Thanks for having me on.

**Jason** (1:55)
And just by way of background, Senator, you were elected to the US. Senate in 2010 You've had two re-elections since then. More recently, we've taken notice and I gave a shout out to you for your comments on the scaling of the deficit and the US federal debt. And as a Republican, against the stated intention of getting this bill passed and through the Senate as is, and we'd love to kind of hear from you today about your points of view on the bill that was passed in the House this week, the reconciliation bill, and then take a step back and talk a little bit about the fiscal picture for the United States and where things are headed. So thanks for that and thanks for joining us. Maybe we could just start a little bit with a very basic primer for our audience, something that we don't talk about very much on the show.
Can you just tell us what a reconciliation bill is and how it's used so folks can understand a little bit about the process that the House just undertook and what's ahead?

**Ron Johnson** (2:47)
Sure. Let me start. You talked about when I first ran for election in 2010, I ran out of the Tea Party. Never had been involved in politics whatsoever, and didn't even decide to run until the end of April and Nelson May started campaign during the summer, did all those parades. But what I would shout during the parades was, this is a fight for freedom. We're mortgaging our children's future, it's wrong, it's immoral, it has to stop. That was my campaign theme in 2010 I still view myself more Tea Party than Republican Party. We have a lot of big spenders in the Republican Party as well and I ran, again, because of Obamacare, which I knew would not work and it's not working. By the way, that's the problem with Medicaid right now, is Obamacare is now called Medicaid expansion. But to answer your question, budget reconciliation was set up in the Budget Act, I think it's 1974
It doesn't work in terms of controlling spending. By the way, nothing ever has. We'll get into that in terms we've never had a process for actually controlling spending, but it allows us to pass a budget and then to reconcile the budget.
You can pass a budget, it's not in law, but you pass this budget with just 50 votes, 51 votes majority, and then you can reconcile to that budget also avoiding the Senate filibuster. So that's the main component. What's weird about it is you pass this budget, but you can only through budget reconciliation address mandatory spending. You can't touch the discretionary spending accounts, which is about 25% of our budget. That's one of the ways the budget has gotten completely out of control is we put so many things into the mandatory category. Initially, it was entitlement, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but we have, I would say, deviously slid all kinds of discretionary spending into other mandatory that really exploded during COVID, where I think other mandatory hit well over $2 trillion. Last fiscal year is about $1.3 trillion. This year will be over a trillion. So it went from $642 billion in 2019, other mandatory. Again, not Social Security, Medicare, even Medicaid. Went from $642 to last year, $1.3 this year. It's going to be over a trillion dollars. It's going to keep pretty much at that level as far as the eye can see. So again, that's a trillion dollars of other non-entitlement spending that we never looked at. And that's the whole point about mandatory spending. It's never looked at. So anyway, so we can address mandatory spending, not Social Security through this reconciliation process, change programs, do whatever we want to do, as long as it has a primarily budgetary impact, not changing policy. So we can change policy as long as it has a budgetary impact. I know that's reasonably complex, but it's an insane system, and it doesn't work.