Six days ago, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin raised a few eyebrows on Capitol Hill. The far-right GOP senator, well aware of the fact that his party would need his support for the far-right megabill, said he wasn’t yet on board with the legislation — because he believed it did far too little to reduce the nation’s budget deficit.
“I’ve got everybody’s attention,” Johnson boasted, adding that it’s “coming down to crunch time — they realize I’m serious, so they need to get serious.”
Three days later, in the early evening, Senate Republicans teed up a vote on a key procedural hurdle that the legislation would need to clear. The Wisconsin Republican again found himself in the spotlight when he initially voted against his party’s reconciliation package, putting its future in doubt.
Soon after, Johnson reportedly had a conversation with Donald Trump and White House officials who vowed to work with him on cutting federal spending, at which point the GOP senator switched his vote and allowed the process to move forward.
Soon after, The New York Times reported that Johnson also demanded a vote on an amendment that would slash Medicaid further, adding that his vote on the overall bill would be dependent on whether that amendment was approved.
That amendment never received a vote. You can probably guess what happened next. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
For weeks, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson suggested nothing short of trillions of dollars in spending cuts and progress toward federal deficit reduction could make him vote for President Donald Trump’s massive tax cuts and spending bill. In the end, he fell in line.
The Wisconsin Republican swore up and down that he was, in his words, “serious” about deficit reduction and ready to leverage his considerable influence to make meaningful changes. Then, independent and nonpartisan analyses found that the Senate’s version of the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
And then Johnson voted for it anyway.
By way of an explanation, the senator told Fox News the night before the vote that he’s confident that the White House will, at some undetermined point, take undetermined steps through an undetermined process to address his concerns — which was apparently good enough for him.
To be sure, these developments weren’t especially surprising. Johnson has talked a good game before, only to succumb to party pressure when it matters, and I don’t imagine anyone on Capitol Hill was shocked to see him reverse course so quickly.
But Johnson’s pitiful display is emblematic of a larger truth: The GOP senator made deficit reduction one of his top priorities, right before he and nearly all of his Republican colleagues voted in support of a radical plan to add trillions of dollars to the debt.
I don’t know how much more evidence might be needed to persuade the political world that “deficit hawks” and the Republican Party’s “fiscally responsible” wing don’t exist, but the proof is overwhelming.
