Senator Ron Johnson
speaker
231 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 31 Dec
Senator Ron Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I've seen it time and time again.
I've been here 15 years.
You use these shutdowns to back us up against a deadline like Thanksgiving or Christmas, drop a multi-thousand-page appropriation bill on our desk, say, take it or leave it, or you're not going to see Christmas.
That has to end.
Power corrupts. Government is power, and it's been corrupt. Nobody knew in total how much we spend because we never even talk about it. The first goal of this Republican budget reconciliation should be don't add to the deficit. I voted for President Trump. because I wanted him to defeat the deep state. You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels.
Our base is going to go, why did we elect you guys? You're really no better than Democrats. I don't think President Trump, he's not focused on reducing spending. This is our one opportunity. And right now we're blowing and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure we don't blow it. I can't be pressured by President Trump.
He's willing to sit down with me, look at the numbers, acknowledge them, working forward in a reasonable plan forward. That's the only way he's going to get my support.
Let me start. You talked about when I first ran for election in 2010, I ran out of the Tea Party, never had been involved in politics whatsoever, and didn't even decide to run until the end of April, announced in May, started a campaign during the summer, did all those parades. What I would shout during the parades was, this is a fight for freedom. We're mortgaging our children's future.
It's wrong. It's immoral. It has to stop. That was my campaign theme in 2010. I still view myself more Tea Party than Republican Party. We have a lot of big spenders in the Republican Party as well. And I ran, again, because of Obamacare, which I knew would not work. And it's not working. By the way, that's the problem with Medicaid right now is Obamacare is now called Medicaid expansion.
But to answer your question, budget reconciliation was set up in the Budget Act, I think it was 1974. It doesn't work in terms of controlling spending. By the way, nothing ever has. We'll get into that in terms of we've never had a process for actually controlling spending. But it allows us to pass a budget and then to reconcile the budget. You're able to pass a budget.
It's not a law, but you pass this budget with just 50 votes, 51 votes majority. And then you can reconcile to that budget, also avoiding the Senate filibuster. So that's the main component. What's weird about it is you pass this budget, but you can only, through budget reconciliation, address mandatory spending. You can't touch the discretionary spending accounts, which is about 25% of our budget.
That's one of the ways the budget has gotten completely out of control is we put so many things into the mandatory category. You know, initially it was entitled Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but we have, I would say, deeply slid all kinds of discretionary spending into other mandatory that really exploded during COVID, where I think other mandatory hit well over $2 trillion.
Last fiscal year is about $1.3 trillion. This year will be over a trillion. So it went from about $642 billion in 2019, other mandatory, again, not Social Security, Medicare, even Medicaid, Went from 642 to last year, 1.3. This year, it's going to be over a trillion dollars and it's going to keep pretty much at that level as far as the eye can see.
So again, that's a trillion dollars of other non-entitlement spending that we never looked at. And that's the whole point about mandatory spending. It's never looked at. So anyway, so we can address mandatory spending, not Social Security, through this reconciliation process, change programs, do whatever we want to do, as long as it has a primarily budgetary impact, not changing policy.
So you can change policy as long as it has a budgetary impact. I know that's reasonably complex, but it's an insane system and it doesn't work.
Well, right now we don't really have them. Again, let's just go through why we've never had a process to control spending. We don't have a balanced budget requirement like states do. And we have the capability of printing money, which we're doing, incurring this enormous debt. So we don't have a balanced budget requirement. I didn't realize this until just recently.
The appropriation committees were literally set up because the authorized committees were big spenders. So they set up appropriation committees to control spending. That didn't work. The Budget Act didn't work. Simpson-Bowles didn't work. The Budget Control Act didn't work. It did restrain discretionary spending for a couple of years until we wheezed our way around.
So again, we've never had a process to control spending. And one of the things I've been arguing in some Wall Street Journal columns is let's use the example of Doge. I come with the private sector. We probably spent more time reviewing my line by line budget for my business.
And I think other private sector businesses spend more time analyzing what they're going to spend than Congress spends over the entire federal budget. So we've got to develop a process. Doge has shown us how to do it. Go contract by contract. Expose the grotesque waste, fraud, and abuse. But we've got to do that through thousands of lines through the federal budget. But nobody's willing to do it.
Nobody's willing to take the time to do the work to do it. They're doing what they've always done. They exempt most spending. They look at a couple of programs, they try and tweak them, try and get a big score out of CBO so they can say, hey, look, we saved $1.5 trillion, and yet that's completely divorced from reality.
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