| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| To Capitol Hill where we are joined by Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self for a few minutes here. | ||
| Congressman, good morning to you. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Glad to have you. | ||
| I know you've been watching closely the work of the Senate parliamentarian as she decides what's in and what's out of the one big beautiful bill and what the Senate will give back to the House eventually. | ||
| What's your assessment of the work that she has done so far in this process? | ||
| Well, it's hard to believe that what she's doing is not intentionally. | ||
| She is basically deconstructing all of the Republican priorities, all of the Conservative priorities in the Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| So as I say, I can't believe this is simply not intentional. | ||
| It's hard to keep up with what she's throwing out of it. | ||
| She's throwing out massive amounts of the spending cuts. | ||
| And look, the tax cuts are certainly the crown jewel of this bill, but the spending cuts are what are going to keep us from just blowing out the deficit from $37 trillion now to well over $50 trillion in 10 years. | ||
| So this bill could be in trouble. | ||
| You noticed that the Speaker just made a comment on it. | ||
| The leader, Leader Scalise, made a comment on it. | ||
| This bill has got to have some changes before I think it's going to get through both the Senate and the House. | ||
| Here's some of the things that Senate parliamentarian that we know so far in this process she's taken out. | ||
| They include a provision that would crack down on strategies that would make states that many states have to develop to obtain more federal Medicaid funds and another that would limit repayment options for student loan borrowers. | ||
| We're finding out this morning the Senate parliamentarian rejected a religious college tax carve-out, gun silencer deregulation. | ||
| The question is, if she takes these provisions out because this is the reconciliation process, is it as easy for you and your colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle to simply pass this through the regular process in the form of another bill? | ||
| Well, of course not, because the reconciliation bill allows the Senate to pass it with 51 votes. | ||
| So there's no way most of these are going to make it pass the Senate filibuster. | ||
| So that's why if this reconciliation bill doesn't get it right, we'll have to take another crack at another reconciliation bill, which we can do. | ||
| But I don't know what the leadership has planned. | ||
| But this is a dramatic move by the Senate parliamentarian. | ||
| I want to emphasize that she is basically tearing apart the spending cuts that we put into this bill very carefully. | ||
| Remember, it passed the House with one vote margin. | ||
| And Speaker Johnson was very clear to the Senate. | ||
| Don't send us something back that is materially different because we passed the House framework with a one vote margin. | ||
| And anyone who's followed you on social media knows that one issues that you've been tracking when it comes to this bill is the clean energy tax breaks. | ||
| What is the status of those right now? | ||
| Well, most of them have been scrubbed. | ||
| I won't say all of them. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| But they are taking out major portions of the Green New scam. | ||
| And that's where we found a lot of savings in the House framework. | ||
| So the dust has yet to settle in the Senate. | ||
| So I'm not going to make any definitive comments. | ||
| But when the dust settles from what the Senate has in it and when we see the Senate vote, then we'll know better just how bad the bill is. | ||
| I want to shift topics to your work on the Foreign Affairs Committee. | ||
| We are hearing that there may be that war powers resolution that might be introduced in the Senate today. | ||
| What is your understanding, what is your assessment of Congress's role here when it comes to Iran and President Trump and what you should be consulted about when it comes to war powers? | ||
| Well, frankly, we've used the AUMF for two decades now plus to allow the President to conduct Article II authority to defend the United States. | ||
| Look, our two oceans no longer protect us from immediate attack. | ||
| Missiles cross the oceans in a matter of seconds. | ||
| The president must have Article II authority to defend the United States. | ||
| The war powers resolution that I understand the Senate's going to be taking up, I don't think it has much of a chance of passing. | ||
| But we do need to write a new AUMF, authorization for the use of military force. | ||
| Because if we're not going to declare war, and Congress, it's not in Congress's DNA to declare war, we need to have an AUMF that lines out those priorities of the Congress for what the President might be able to do. | ||
| But this war powers resolution is not going to go anywhere. | ||
| What would that AUMF look like? | ||
| There's been concerns in the past that previous AUMFs are so open-ended that they could lead to any sort of conflict. | ||
| What would you want included in a new AUMF, authorization of use of military force? | ||
| Well, AUMFs in the past have been nation-state-oriented. | ||
| We now know that non-nation states, terrorist groups, cartels, and so forth and so on, wage war on their own. | ||
| So that's what we need to be, and that's what we're looking at very cautiously, very carefully. | ||
| What does a new AUMF look like? | ||
| And frankly, there's no movement on it right now with this current Congress. | ||
| But we've had conversations in the past, and I'm sure we will in the future, given this attack on Iran. | ||
| But it's got to be designed very carefully so that we understand who is in the AUMF. | ||
| Just a couple more questions on Iran. | ||
| I know that in about 55 minutes or so, the House is expected to have its own classified briefing when it comes to Iran and the impacts of those strikes. | ||
| The Senate had their classified briefing yesterday. | ||
| What are you expecting? | ||
| What do you want to hear when you enter that briefing? | ||
| I want to hear just how precise those weapons were. | ||
| When you talk about a tomahawk, when you talk about one of the big bombs, you can choose which window to put them in. | ||
| So I'm excited to hear that I understand maybe five of those big bombs went in the same hole. | ||
| That's the kind of precision that our military has today. | ||
| And frankly, given the vibration sensitivity of centrifuges, I expect to hear, if we've done the entire bomb damage assessment yet, I expect to hear a very good report on the attack on Iran. | ||
| This was a monumental enterprise across power projection across the globe. | ||
| An amazing operation. | ||
| What did you think of the White House yesterday saying they might need to limit some intelligence sharing when it comes to members of Congress and these sort of classified briefings? | ||
| Actually, I think there are members of Congress that should never hear anything classified because you know when they get it, it's going into social media, it's going to the front page of the New York Times, it's going on the front page of the Washington Post. | ||
| I think there are members that, absolutely, I would not give them a single classified piece of information. | ||
| And then finally, Congressman, what else is on your agenda today? | ||
| What else are you going to be working on on Capitol Hill? | ||
| Well, hearing the classified briefing and then trying to discern what the Senate's doing, because we're trying to figure out what our timing is. | ||
| I think the Rules Committee is coming back on Monday, so it's going to move fairly fast, perhaps. | ||
| And that's the key, perhaps. | ||
| If the Big Beautiful Bill doesn't meet the House framework and we don't take care of the Green New scam, the diversity of House members that are against what the Senate is doing is wide. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to articulate the number of members that are against what the Senate is doing. | ||
| I'm not going to prognosticate what's going to happen in the House. | ||
| Does that make you less optimistic that this bill could be passed by July 4th, the original deadline that President Trump had laid out and that Congress said? | ||
| I'm not going to deal in a hypothetical, but I will tell you that people are concerned about what the Senate is doing. | ||
| Congressman Keith Self, Republican of Texas, member of the Foreign Affairs and Veteran Affairs Committee, we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
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