Ron Johnson: ‘Big Beautiful Bill Will Die in the Senate’

Sen. Ron Johnson said Wednesday he thinks House Republicans’ reconciliation bill is “going down.” And he’s working to ensure its demise.

“The ‘big, beautiful bill,’ I think that’s the Titanic,” the third-term Wisconsin Republican said at a POLITICO Live event in Washington, arguing it doesn’t do enough to reduce spending. “I think that’s going down because I think I have enough colleagues in the Senate that this has resonated with, that say, ‘yeah, we have to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic spending.’”

Johnson’s comments indicate that even if the House is able to secure the votes to pass its ambitious legislative package this week, it will struggle to clear the Senate.

Wisconsin’s senior senator has been openly critical of his House colleague’s approach to the party-line spending legislation, which aims to extend President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts as well as a bevy of other Republican domestic priorities. Instead, he made a case for passing a series of smaller bills, including a clean, permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts and a short-term increase to the debt ceiling.

Trump rejected that approach earlier this year, throwing his weight behind what he dubbed, “one big, beautiful bill,” a House effort to wrap the tax and spending cuts into one package that could clear the House with its razor-thin Republican majority.

Johnson called that “a mistake” and said Congress needed to pass a “simple and rational” tax system that helps to calm the uncertainty currently rippling through the economy — something he blamed both on Washington’s unsustainable spending and the president’s on-again, off-again trade wars.

“The whole tariff, the whole trade war, has injected an enormous amount of uncertainty and instability,” Johnson said. “We’ve got to calm that down.”

Democrats have pounced on the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s tariff policy, arguing that it runs counter to Trump’s campaign pledge to lower costs for Americans.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, noted at the POLITICO Live event that U.S. tariff rates are now five times higher than before Trump was sworn in, with little to show for it.

“The president keeps saying that this has been accomplished, and that’s been accomplished,” said Wyden, who spoke before Johnson. But in terms of the early trade agreements the administration has struck with the United Kingdom and China, “there’s very little there, there.”

“China got the reduction in their tariffs, and what did we get? Essentially nothing,” Wyden lamented.

Wyden and Johnson expressed similar concerns about how Trump’s trade agenda is affecting the American economy, and both suggested that changes to the tax code would be more effective than broad-based tariffs in incentivizing manufacturers to reshore production in the U.S.

Speaking on a panel at the POLITICO Live event, Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) said the federal government should also focus on domestic industrial policy.

“I want Democrats to get this right. When I’m talking about targeted enforcement paired with real muscular industrial policy, that is what I think is what our answer should be,” Deluzio said, of his party’s response to Trump’s disruptive tariff agenda. “It’s improving on some things the Biden administration did. We can’t just say, [Trump’s] ‘bad, let’s go back to that.’ I think we’ve got to do it better.”

While Johnson has been critical of Trump’s tariff policy, he has not signed on to several bipartisan legislative attempts to block the president’s ability to impose some of those tariffs.

“We have to see how this plays out,” Johnson explained. “I don’t want to undermine whatever negotiating strategy [Trump] has,” though he acknowledged, “I don’t know what it is.”

“My primary focus is spending, spending, spending, spending,” Johnson continued. “He’ll take care of trade. … Really, there’s nothing that we can do. We can poke a stick in his eye. That just undermines him and I don’t want to undermine his negotiating strategy.”

Wyden suggested Johnson and other Republicans’ patience on Trump’s tariff agenda is likely to run out as the full impact of Trump’s trade agenda hits the U.S. economy. “I think it will take some kind of outrage from the grassroots Republican base,” the Oregon senator said. “And I think it’s coming.”