There was a tie in the U.S. Senate to pass President Donald Trump's 2026 budget he coined his "big, beautiful bill." It means that one Republican senator could have stopped its passage, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said that one wouldn't know that, given Hawley's latest comments denouncing the vote he just cast.
"Well, I think that if Republicans don't come out strong and say we're going to protect rural hospitals, then yeah, I think voters aren't going to like that. The provider cuts that are now not going to affect Missouri until the 2030s. My goal is to make sure those never take effect," said Hawley about the bill he supported.
The reporter asked him "how" he would do that, and he said "legislation."
"But the truth of the matter is we shouldn't be cutting rural hospitals," Hawley continued. "I'm completely opposed to cutting rural hospitals, period. I haven't changed my view on that one iota."
Wallace returned to the screen shouting, "Except when you did! My position is to write a law to reverse the law I just signed? What!?"
"He did the opposite of what he said in that interview," she continued. "He just voted to cut rural hospital funding, including in his own state of Missouri. That was Missouri Senator Josh Hawley with the audacious degree of spin there. Hawley supported Donald Trump's cuts to rural health care, his disastrous and deeply unpopular mega bill, which, among many other things, will cut medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion."
Former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) said that she wasn't surprised by the comments because that's who Hawley is.
"Yeah, I'm going to try and stay calm here and not go into a full-blown rant," said McCaskill. "Obviously, Hawley is particularly offensive to me for a number of reasons. You know, he has pretended to be something he isn't from the day he appeared on the ballot in Missouri."
She said he's "incredibly ambitious" and someone who "changes his stripes whenever it's convenient."
"The irony here is that he is actually saying with a straight face, 'Well, you know, I'm really against this.' And all he had to do was vote 'no' when the bill went down, and then he would have had an opportunity to negotiate to do something different than what he signed up for," said McCaskill.
She said that she doubts Missouri will give him a pass.
In 2020, Missouri passed a bill to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. GOP leaders fought it at every turn until the state Supreme Court intervened and ruled unanimously that the measure must be implemented.
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