By coinnews 
00:00 Josh
The GOP-led House Budget Committee votes down President Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill. Bill facing several forms of opposition here to break it all down for us, Washington correspondent, Ben Werschkul. Ben.
00:14 Ben Werschkul
Hey Josh, yeah, so today was a tough day for President Trump and um, House speaker, Mike Johnson’s efforts on this House Reconciliation package. As you mentioned, this has, this is a bill that has some opposition on various fronts, and today it was the fiscal Hawks, who really sort of made their voice felt. This is a group of conservatives who in the House Budget Committee joined with Democrats, and this is even after Trump posted online to kind of yell at them online to vote to deny advancement for this bill. Um, and the issue here is the cost of this bill. This is a bill that according to the Committee on a Responsible Federal Budget could lead to 3.2 trillion in new government borrowing. This is just new government borrowing over the next decade, if it passes as is. And there’s, and there’s lots of amendments that could be coming that would, they would increase that even further. And these are these are, these are hardline Republicans, fiscal conservatives who, this is their number one priority is keeping the cost of this bill under control. Um, and it led to a real remarkable scene today um, on on Capitol Hill, where you had some of the hardest, those most conservative Republicans you’ll ever find calling this bill quote smoke and mirrors, or in need of quote profound changes. So there’s, there’s real deep opposition here that Mike Johnson is going to have a hard time getting ahead, getting ahead of. And and the way these things work is this is kind of like a daisy chain where all, this now, this now sort of moves everything further down the line, and it immediately calls into question Johnson’s effort to get this bill passed through the house by Memorial Day in about a week’s time. And then it raises questions further about the overall Republican effort to get this to Trump’s desk by the end of the summer, by, by July or so. Um, as for the next shoe to drop for people who don’t have weekend plans, the budget committee’s going to try again, and they announced a, a time, an auspicious time for this. They’re going to reconvene Sunday night at 10:00 PM. So at 10:00 PM on Sunday night, hearing to kind of take this vote again, because they need to get over this step before they can do the ones ahead.
03:54 Josh
Ben, I love it, and I’m so glad you just mentioned that there’s yet another step. I’ve become so skeptical of Washington. You talk about deep opposition, I would say deep grandstanding. Um, so is is, is there a realistic expectation that this just gave an opportunity for the fiscal hawks to basically say, no we are standing our ground. They made their point and now behind the scenes, behind closed doors, things start to happen, and then maybe Sunday night at 10 o’clock, we get some sort of magical breakthrough?
04:37 Ben Werschkul
For sure, yeah, here in Washington things tend to, nothing tends to happen for a long time, and then it happens very quickly right at the end. There’s, there’s a few fronts to this and I think there’s some where you can kind of clearly see the the way this ends. Salt, the salt tax deduction is a big element of this and there, there’s clearly um elements of of compromise here. The Medicaid piece of this, I would caution people, you have two groups that want essentially opposite things. There’s one that wants to protect Republicans that want to protect Medicaid, and they realize that sort of denying healthcare for a lot of people which would happen if this passed is something they’re opposed to. And then these fiscal conservatives who who want increased cuts there. So that’s going to be a harder one to solve, but to your point, you know there’s a lot of kind of last minute things that’ll happen and we could see sort of this going forward. The timing is very much in question though.