| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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| The Senate takes up one big beautiful bill and here to walk us through what faces senators as they do that. | ||
| Ursula Perano, who covers the Senate for NOTICE. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thanks for having me. | |
| A little bit about Notice for those who may not be familiar with it. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom started here in D.C. | |
| We cover a lot of politics issues around town. | ||
| We cover Congress. | ||
| We also have a very large fellowship class where we are mentoring the next generation of journalists. | ||
| So folks should be sure to give it a read. | ||
| Your coverage of the Senate, especially this week, will include what they do with the bill that was just passed in the House. | ||
| What's been the first reaction overall to it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think the first reaction from senators has been, we are going to change this thing. | |
| We've heard a number of conservatives come out outright saying they're against the bill as it is currently written. | ||
| There's a mix of concerns. | ||
| We have some folks concerned about the spending levels. | ||
| Rand Paul says he's concerned about the debt limit. | ||
| Josh Hawley says he's concerned about Medicaid provisions. | ||
| A number of sort of more moderate senators, the Susan Collins, the Lisa Murkowski's, also have their own concerns. | ||
| And even the senators who seem like they maybe could tolerate the bill as written are saying, yeah, we're going to have to change it to get the votes over here. | ||
| So it will have to go back to the House. | ||
| There are a lot of questions about what that process is going to look like, whether there are going to be formal markups, whether it's going to be just sort of rewritten and new bill put on the floor. | ||
| We're going to see that play out this week. | ||
| But Republicans in the Senate are saying, yeah, this isn't going to work for us here and we're going to need to make some tweaks. | ||
| I was going to say, with that much opposition right off the bat, the likelihood that even gets a vote at all, what's the possibility? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do not think this current version of the bill would go to the Senate floor. | |
| I don't think leadership wants to take a loss on the floor. | ||
| And right now, the votes just aren't there. | ||
| They can only lose three Senate Republicans before Vice President JD Vance would have to come break a tie. | ||
| And if they lose four Senate Republicans, the bill goes down altogether. | ||
| And right now, there are at least four people who have said they are not in support of this bill, for conservatives at least. | ||
| And then, of course, of course, there are those other concerns that folks need to work through. | ||
| There's something, apologies. | ||
| You wrote something recently. | ||
| If people go to the website, by the way, you can find it. | ||
| You talked about the Byrd amendment, or at least what that does to the overall process. | ||
| Can you explain that for our viewers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so this is such a wonky issue, but it matters so much to reconciliation. | |
| The Byrd Rule. | ||
| The Byrd rule requires that anything that is going to be in this bill be strictly tied to the federal budget, have a significant budgetary impact. | ||
| The Senate parliamentarian is going to be in charge of deeming whether provisions in this bill are closely tied enough to the budget to get through. | ||
| She is not a legal authority. | ||
| Her name is Elizabeth McDonough. | ||
| The parliamentarian is not a legal authority. | ||
| She can be overruled, but generally leadership defers to her. | ||
| And Thun has said he does not want to overrule her regarding the Byrd rule. | ||
| So what's happening behind the scenes right now is staff for both sides of the aisle in the Senate are preparing their arguments for what they think should or should not be included in the bill based on the bird rule. | ||
| Democrats are trying to find things they could strip out based on bird rule objections that the parliamentarian might agree with them on. | ||
| And Republicans are trying to find ways to defend certain provisions staying in. | ||
| So it does have a genuine impact on this bill and also could cause some delays. | ||
| I talked to some folks who have been through this process before and said it takes a few weeks to get through this degree of arguments and provisions and sort of detailed granular review of the bill, with of course Senate Republican leadership hoping to get this bill done by July 4th. | ||
| We saw the former deadline of Memorial Day as far as the passage. | ||
| That has passed us by. | ||
| What's the likelihood July 4th is realistic at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Senate Republicans want July 4th because that's around when we're expecting the debt limit to hit. | |
| And they are hoping to include a debt limit increase as part of this bill. | ||
| So there is a motivation there. | ||
| They don't want to do a separate debt limit bill because then they would have to work with Senate Democrats to get around a filibuster on the matter. | ||
| I think it's tricky. | ||
| You know, they have, I think it's four, maybe five weeks of legislative session left. | ||
| There's a couple of days of recess in there for the Juneteenth holiday. | ||
| It's a tight timeline. | ||
| And we did see the House manage to meet that Memorial Day time deadline after, I believe, blowing past an Easter deadline. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| And I think that we're going to see folks trying to go pedal to the metal when they come back today. | ||
| Ursula Perano joining us. | ||
| And if you have questions about the Senate as this takes up the tax and immigration and other related bill from the President and the House Republicans and want to ask her questions on it, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8002 for Independents. | ||
| If you want to text your questions, it's 202-748-8003. | ||
| Senator Hawley was one of those early on talking about concerns for Medicaid. | ||
| What's motivating that on his side? | ||
|
unidentified
|
His state has a very high Medicaid enrollment, and so we do see that from a number of centers. | |
| Some of the West Virginia senators, for example, both Republicans Jim Justice and Shelley Moore Capito have also said, you know, they need to look closely at those provisions. | ||
| And there are a number of Republican states with Republican senators that are going to have those questions as well. | ||
| Hawley has been pressing and very open that he will not support this bill if he does not feel the Medicaid provisions are up to par or what he's willing to work around. | ||
| He is concerned about qualified beneficiaries losing coverage. | ||
| And he's not the only one. | ||
| So that's going to be a primary issue where folks need to work through what that language actually turns out to be. | ||
| Senator Collins of Maine expressing that, Senator Murkowski expressing that, and another publication calling them the Medicaid moderates are the ones to watch, especially as this plays out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| It's a very strong contingent. | ||
| And there are other provisions in this bill, too, that the Senate just doesn't have the same approach as the House does. | ||
| House members are much more a pulse of their district. | ||
| They're working with a smaller group of people. | ||
| Senators are representing an entire state. | ||
| So sometimes they have different considerations. | ||
| The salt tax is another issue in the bill that we had a number of senators say. | ||
| I don't think we're going to have the same concerns about the salt tax here amongst Republicans in the Senate as Republicans in the House might have. | ||
| Most of the folks in the House who had concerns about salt were from New York. | ||
| And both of the senators from New York and the Senate are Democrats. | ||
| So you don't have that same sort of lobbying and representation for that issue here. | ||
| You hinted at it, but as the bill gets consideration, what faces the Senate leader as he's trying to manage all this, Jon Thune? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got to get through the parliamentarian. | |
| He's probably going to be dealing with pressure from House members to ignore the parliamentarian on anything she deems not kosher to go in the bill. | ||
| And he's going to be having to work with a lot of different factions of his conference. | ||
| You know, I think so far we've seen Senate Republicans, in many ways to a surprising degree, stick together through a very unusual cabinet confirmation process. | ||
| So far they haven't had any particularly surprising bills go down or anything on the matter. | ||
| But this will be a big test for John Thune, whether he can corral these extremely different wings of the conference when you're talking about a Rand Paul and a Susan Collins, right? | ||
| Have very different concerns and priorities for this bill, what they're comfortable with going through. | ||
| And trying to get all of those folks on the same page is going to be a test. | ||
| Again, the numbers 202748-8001 for Republicans, Democrats, 202748, 8,000, and Independents 202748-8,0002. | ||
| You mentioned Senator Rand Paul on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| Talk a little bit about his concerns. | ||
| He expressed those. | ||
| We'll show you a little bit of that. | ||
| Get your comments on it. | ||
| Well, the math doesn't really add up. | ||
| One of the things this big and beautiful bill is, is it's a vehicle for increasing spending for the military and for the border. | ||
| It's about $320 billion in new spending. | ||
| To put that in perspective, that's more than all the Doge cuts that we've found so far. | ||
| So the increase in spending put into this bill exceeds the Doge cuts. | ||
| When you look just at the border wall, they have $46.5 billion for the border wall. | ||
| Well, their current estimate from the CBP is $6.5 million per mile. | ||
| So if you did 1,000 miles, that's $6.5 billion. | ||
| But they have $46 billion. | ||
| So they've inflated the cost of the wall eightfold. | ||
| So there's a lot of new spending that has to be counteracted. | ||
| But essentially, this is a bill by the military-industrial complex advocates who are padding the military budget. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of extra money. | ||
| Look, the president has essentially stopped the border flow without new money and without any new legislation. | ||
| So I think they're asking for too much money. | ||
| And in the end, the way you add it up to see if it actually is going to save money or add money is how much debt are they going to borrow? | ||
| $5 trillion over two years. | ||
| It's an enormous amount. | ||
| So Ursula Perrano, let's start with that last bit, the eventually the idea of what it does to the debt. | ||
| How many senators like Senator Paul at this point expressing those concerns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So Paul seems to be among a group of four senators that have these concerns. | |
| It is himself, it is Senator Rick Scott, Senator Mike Lee, and Senator Ron Johnson are all seems speaking as part of a group. | ||
| Ron Johnson and the Senate before they left town after this bill passed was openly naming. | ||
| These are the guys I've got that are also sharing these concerns about spending levels. | ||
| We've heard members of this group, including Paul, say they just think it is too high. | ||
| They're concerned about what it's doing to the national debt. | ||
| He seems to have a very specific concern about also including the debt limit increase in the bill. | ||
| He said that if that was not part of it, he might be a little more amenable. | ||
| But this is a big bill, and there are concerns about what it'll do to the budget. | ||
| And these folks could have the power to stall it if they genuinely are not comfortable with the numbers that are being shown as a result. | ||
| He threw immigration into the mix as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and there are a lot of questions about immigration regarding the bird rule, what can get through, because that has been an issue that historically, when senators on both sides are trying to do reconciliation bills, the parliamentarian has questions about how closely are these immigration provisions tied to the federal budget. | |
| So it'll be interesting to see whether Senate Republicans can maintain their arguments on these elements of the bill as well. | ||
| Let's hear from John. | ||
| John is in Florida. | ||
| Republican line for our guest, Ursula Perano, of notice. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is basically for the U.S. Senate. | |
| You know, the perfect is the enemy of the good. | ||
| This bill is absolutely necessary to remediate a lot of the problems that due to corruption have ruined the economy for the middle class and the safety over the last 35 years, really starting with Daddy Bush. | ||
| Because remember, he drafted and negotiated NAFTA, and then it was signed by Bill Clinton in November of 93. | ||
| So if this bill does not pass, the economy of the U.S. is going to be in shambles. | ||
| President Trump passed many things within this bill or has many things that will remediate all that pathology over the last 30-something years. | ||
| So again, if these senators, Murkowski, Collins, Johnson, and Ray and Paul, do not sign off on this bill ultimately, ultimately, then they need to, honest news stations need to research who's paid them off to betray America. | ||
| Now, we know the Democrats are not going to help America. | ||
| They're in the pocket of guys like Soros that are always for ruining America. | ||
| You know, but you got Republican, Trump agenda Republicans, you know, who are actually not in the pocket of bad actors. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, John, got your thought, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I think that when you're talking about the perfect being the enemy of the good, that is very true in Congress generally. | |
| One thing that is helpful context for reconciliation is that it is a limited use procedure. | ||
| The benefit of reconciliation and why lawmakers do enjoy this process is that in the Senate, it is a way around the filibuster. | ||
| Usually legislation in the Senate is subject to a 60-vote threshold. | ||
| Reconciliation requires only a 50-vote threshold. | ||
| But you can only use reconciliation once a fiscal year. | ||
| There have been exceptions for federal emergencies where there is a significant need to pass a bill related to the budget. | ||
| But the reason that many Republican senators, and we saw this last time, Democrats did reconciliation as well, are very firm on making sure they try and get everything they want in is because they don't get a lot of opportunities like this to not need to try and get to that 60-vote threshold where they do need Democratic support. | ||
| This is their best chance to get conservative policy through this term. | ||
| From Georgia, Republican line, Roy is next. | ||
| Hello, Roy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I hope you could answer a question for me that's been going through my mind for a little while. | ||
| I'm on Social Security. | ||
| I have Medicare. | ||
| When I go to the doctor, the doctor will bill Medicare a Social Security to pay my bill. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| A person on Medicare Advantage, they, well, my thing is this, is that the government is taking the same Social Security money and paying the insurance company $1,200 a year for Medicare Advantage. | ||
| To my understanding, even if a person does not go to the doctor, put money to the private insurance company. | ||
| If we just stop future enrollment into Medicare supplement, I mean, Medicare Advantage, go back to traditional Medicare where you had Medicare supplement, would we save the money? | ||
| I mean, are we just paying money to private insurance company, even when there's no services provided? | ||
| Roy, in Georgia, thanks for the call. | ||
| Let me take this question and ask you this. | ||
| We heard President Trump saying, don't touch Medicaid. | ||
| He said that to the House members all the time. | ||
| Is he going to make that same type of message to the Senate and how's that going to be received? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, when he made that message to House Republicans in a conference meeting a few weeks ago, it really did embolden some of the opponents of this bill in the Senate for these Medicaid provisions who are concerned about kicking qualified beneficiaries off. | |
| I think that it is a question of how much Trump weighs into the Senate. | ||
| In the House, it seems like he had to go. | ||
| He had to go and get people on board. | ||
| The House is difficult to control. | ||
| Speaker Mike Johnson and him were able to come together to get folks on board. | ||
| It was a big question of if this bill would even pass there at all or whether it would have to be rewritten. | ||
| I don't know whether we're going to see as much of a presence of him in the Senate. | ||
| You know, some of the people who are opponents of this bill or question marks on this bill aren't even the closest allies or necessarily aligned with Trump themselves. | ||
| And we're talking perhaps about some of those moderate senators who have openly rebuked him on a number of issues. | ||
| So whether he steps back in and tries to handle these Medicaid concerns in the Senate will be a big question over the next few weeks. | ||
| What's the likelihood that JD Vance, being in the Senate before himself, is the one to maybe make the calls and twist the arms, so to speak? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I could see that. | |
| You know, he's come around a couple times this year. | ||
| He does have relationships in the Senate, and he has sort of worked as a liaison on some of these issues. | ||
| We have seen some folks coming to Senate Republican lunch to explain their side of the bill. | ||
| For example, the last lunch or full conference lunch that Senate Republicans had, Speaker Mike Johnson himself came and he walked senators through why the bill looks this way, why it was so carefully negotiated. | ||
| I heard he used the line that passing this bill in the House was like crossing the Grand Canyon on dental floss. | ||
| You know, he was trying to relay, this is a very delicate process and we are trying to not change it up too much and risk it being complicated when it does inevitably kick back to the House with changes. | ||
| You talked about the Senate parliamentary and the role she has. | ||
| What history does she have in taking a look at reconciliation type bills and being, you know, a very, you know, by the book, so to speak, when it comes to what can be done in it and what can't? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Folks who I spoke to who have worked with her through this process on previous reconciliation bills say she has a very tight, narrow view of what budget or being closely aligned to the budget looks like. | ||
| It can go very parliamentarian to parliamentarian over the historical, you know, history of reconciliation bills. | ||
| What people will allow in, it's very much an art, not a science. | ||
| She seems to be on the stricter side of wanting to make sure that things are not overly sweepy of what comes in the bill. | ||
| It does seem from folks I've talked to that when she goes through the process, she likes to, you know, give one win to Republicans, give one win to Democrats. | ||
| She tries to be fair when she's going through of not being overly favorable to one side or the other. | ||
| But it will be a question too of how staff who are preparing these arguments present them. | ||
| A lot of folks said that this is a carefully, it's like a courtroom style, carefully constructed process where they are trying to be prepared for every objection that the other side can have. | ||
| The Senate's back this week. | ||
| You talked about the July 4th deadline. | ||
| Walk us through the first steps. | ||
| What happens this week and ongoing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, when they come back today, reporters swarm and we will have a lot of questions. | |
| I think first we're looking to hear from leadership on what they think this process is going to look like. | ||
| When they last left town, the House had just passed the bill a matter of hours before. | ||
| So as I mentioned at the top, the questions on markups, whether they're going to do that formally, whether they're going to try and conference the bill. | ||
| I had spoken to Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham right before he left town, and he said he still needed to talk to leadership about it and figure out what that looks like. | ||
| So I think right now there's a big question about is this going to be a very formalized process? | ||
| Is this going to be a matter of lunches where they sit down and try and work through their disagreements on the bill? | ||
| My guess is that I feel like if they did have markups, it would be very public what their disagreements are and very time consuming. | ||
| So I would say based on how the Senate generally has handled these sort of sweeping policy issues that it would be a family matter and a conversation not to be had in public, but we'll have to see. | ||
| Does that family also include House Republican, the majority or the House Speaker, Mike Johnson? | ||
| Is he still in communication in this process with Senator Thune? | ||
|
unidentified
|
From what we know, Senator Thun and Speaker Mike Johnson have remained in pretty constant contact throughout this process. | |
| And yet, in many ways, they still have seemed unaligned on some of the key provisions or approach to this bill. | ||
| I mean, for months, we were debating one bill versus two, and it seemed there wasn't necessarily a family agreement on that matter. | ||
| But I do think it's very likely that we do continue to see House Republicans be a voice in this matter. | ||
| Because inevitably, if the Senate makes changes and they send it back to the House, they do have to consider what can we get through there. | ||
| They know if we change too much, it could complicate passage over there, and they don't want to blow past that July 4th deadline. | ||
| Ursula Parano of Notice joining us for this conversation. | ||
| Let's hear from Felix. | ||
| Felix in North Carolina. | ||
| Felix is on our line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN America. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| How are y'all on this beautiful day? | ||
| Fine, sir. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question here is basically on the waste, fraud, and abuse cause. | |
| I haven't seen any yet because I watch a lot of the hearings and stuff. | ||
| I hear a lot of propaganda coming from all sides, but I'd like to see somebody either indicted or actually produce some under oath. | ||
| My second issue here deals with the waste, fraud, and abuse also. | ||
| And we have a senator up there, or there's one from Florida called Rick Scott. | ||
| He was president of HCA Columbia. | ||
| And if I'm not mistaken, he was the largest Medicare fraud person that has ever been in history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About $1.7 billion fraud. | |
| His company, HEA Club. | ||
| We'll take you live now to remarks by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at a conference marking the 75th anniversary of the Fed's International Finance Division. | ||
| You're watching live coverage. | ||
| Thank you. |