House Republicans wanted the Senate to fix their megabill. They 'miscalculated.'
This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP's chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along.
That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had 'miscalculated.'
'We are a more conservative body,' Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who 'cringe at the sound of any word that starts with 'Medi.''
As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they're not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts.
'We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That's the main difference,' Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated.
No permanence enemies
In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders' vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks.
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New York Post
12 minutes ago
- New York Post
Ex-Gov. David Paterson backing Eric Adams for NYC mayor— after endorsing Andrew Cuomo in Dem primary
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New York Times
13 minutes ago
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U.S. Ethics Agency Warns Bessent Over Conflicts of Interest
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In a letter to the Treasury's ethics office at the time, Mr. Bessent, who was formerly the top investor for the liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, said that he would do so to 'avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest.' Cabinet officials are required to shed certain holdings and investments within 90 days of being confirmed to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump has pushed the boundaries of traditional government ethics norms by publicly pushing his business interests, and top Trump administration officials have reached unusual ethics agreements that have allowed them to oversee government matters that involve former lobbying clients or could benefit family members. Most members of Mr. Trump's cabinet have completed their compliance agreements, but Mr. Bessent has not yet lived up to that commitment. 'I am notifying you that Scott Bessent, secretary of the Department of the Treasury, has failed to timely comply with certain terms of the ethics agreement he signed and that O.G.E. previously provided to your office for consideration during his confirmation process,' Dale Christopher, the ethics office's deputy director of compliance, wrote to Mr. Crapo in a letter on Monday that was reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Christopher said that Mr. Bessent was required to divest from certain investments or sell assets by April 28. The Treasury secretary made changes to his ethics agreement on May 2 and June 5, but still has yet to fully honor his pledge and has offered no timeline for when he will comply. 'O.G.E. will continue to monitor the status of the secretary's compliance with his ethics agreement,' Mr. Christopher wrote. 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Treasury officials told Mr. Christopher that Mr. Bessent would continue to be recused from 'particular matters' affecting his assets and that the department's ethics staff had given Mr. Bessent's office a 'screening memorandum' to help identify potentially conflicting matters that the secretary might encounter. Mr. Bessent said in a statement that he divested 90 percent of the assets that he was required to before assuming office and that just 4 percent of the required divestitures remain. He explained that much of what remains is farmland, which is 'an inherently highly illiquid asset,' and made clear that he was not using the job for personal financial gain. 'The honor of serving the American people under President Trump can't be ascribed a dollar value,' Mr. Bessent said. 'As agreed upon with O.G.E., I am working towards selling the rest of my required divestitures before the end of this year.' The Treasury secretary added that he was 'committed to full transparency and disclosure in my personal finances.' After he was nominated, Mr. Bessent shuttered his Key Square Capital Management investment fund and resigned from several nonprofit organizations and trusts that he oversaw. The letter from the Office of Government Ethics does not specify exactly which holdings Mr. Bessent has yet to divest. However, in a June letter to the Treasury's ethics office, Mr. Bessent said that he would not divest from a private equity fund or his investments in a flavored water company and a clinical stage drug development company. He explained that the assets, which he originally pledged to divest, proved too difficult to sell and that officials from the government ethics office confirmed that they did not pose conflicts of interest. 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On Wednesday, the Campaign Legal Center and the Democracy Defenders Fund filed a formal complaint with the government ethics office and requested that the Treasury's inspector general investigate whether Mr. Bessent had violated criminal conflict-of-interest laws. The groups pointed to Mr. Bessent's role overseeing trade negotiations, regulation of cryptocurrency markets and policies that affect private equity funds. 'Secretary Bessent's continued deferral of his ethics obligations raises serious concerns about whether he is complying with the ethics laws or not,' wrote officials from the Campaign Legal Center and the Democracy Defenders Fund, which is led by the former Obama administration ethics czar Norm Eisen. Democrats in Congress have also been scrutinizing Mr. Bessent's holdings. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, suggested that Trump administration officials were being duplicitous by flouting federal ethics guidelines. 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New York Times
13 minutes ago
- New York Times
The Democrats Are in Danger. So Are the Republicans.
'Twenty years from now, will we be a country of Democrats and Republicans taking turns on who's in power?' Pete Buttigieg asked recently. 'I'm not so sure.' Speaking to Mosheh Oinounou, a podcaster and former CBS News producer, the conspicuous institutionalist casually blasted the country's institutions and proposed that, amid the wreckage, America's political future was not at all intuitive. 'We're past the point of just believing that there's some pendulum that comes back and forth,' Buttigieg went on. 'I think that both parties should examine the chances of their survival.' Americans love to decry the country's limited political menu, and talking up third-party challenges to the two-party system has been a cottage industry at least since Ross Perot. In a time of anti-establishment feeling, there's additional incentive to hype a crackup, even though structural forces make that chatter look perennially foolish. And I'm not predicting that America's two major parties are going to actually split up anytime soon. But peek across the Atlantic at the changing shape of our close-cousin democracy in Britain, and the possibilities seem, as Buttigieg suggests, open. It was just last summer that Keir Starmer and Labour won a smashing victory over Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives, bringing a striking end to more than a decade of Tory austerity rule and securing the second-largest parliamentary majority since World War II. But just over a year later, Starmer's net approval rating has fallen from plus 10 to minus 40. Labour as a whole has lost more support in its first 10 months in office than any other governing party in 40 years. Labour's Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, broke into tears last month in Parliament, in a richly symbolic event for the British political media. Since resuming power, her party has struggled to deliver meaningful new policy or escape the widespread impression of nervous, triangulating centrism. To trust the polls, the strongest challenger is now not the Conservative Party, as tradition would suggest, but Reform — Nigel Farage's rebrand of the upstart Brexit party, a populist-nihilist meme factory very much in the MAGA mold. Reform won only five seats in Parliament last summer, but it has maintained a steady polling lead over Labour since April — and an even larger lead over the Tory coalition from which it mostly sprang. Through the summer, polls have suggested that in the event of a sudden election, Reform would win, indeed quite spectacularly: Estimates suggest a huge 200-seat margin, for a party that did not even exist at the time of the Brexit vote. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
