The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board applauded the House GOP on Thursday for finally managing to cobble together enough unified votes to pass the Senate's budget blueprint for President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on tax cuts, energy, and border security — but warned them that now that's behind them, the hard part of actually writing the legislation itself begins.
This process, which the board has repeatedly covered, saw a contingent of far-right holdout lawmakers opposed to the bill out of suspicion that it didn't do enough to guarantee the spending cuts they want. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) ultimately won them over with an open invitation to fire him from the speakership if he didn't fulfill his commitments.
"Credit Senate Majority Leader John Thune for putting his own capital on the line and mixing it up with the House Freedom Caucus to get the bill across the finish line," wrote the board, noting that his comments to make the cuts "aggressive" can be "a marker the House deficit hawks can use to drive the bill toward real Medicaid reform some Senators might otherwise prefer to exclude. But that will require intellectual spade work and not merely yelling online."
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After all, the board noted, "Democrats are attacking the GOP on Medicaid, and Republicans will have to make the case, repeatedly, for their plan to improve the health program for the poor and vulnerable, while putting prime-age men back to work."
Meanwhile, wrote the board, Trump has already made numerous demands about new tax breaks that should be included, making offsets that much more difficult. His pledge to end taxes on tips and overtime wages are well-known at this point, the board noted, but there's much else on the table too, a lot of which would be massively expensive tax cuts for the rich: "Are Republicans prepared to resist Mr. Trump’s hoary deduction on car-loan interest?"
Ultimately, the board concluded, "The budget advance is an encouraging sign that Republicans want to govern and won’t tolerate the $4.5 trillion tax increase that arrives if they fail to pass a bill by the end of the year. Then again, this was the easy part."
