Rep. Ralph Norman, one of the House of Representatives’ hard-line fiscal conservatives, is making it clear that he and a number of others in the House would have difficulty accepting any Senate “big, beautiful bill” that increases deficits.
“If it’s more spending and more deficit spending, it’s a nonstarter,” Norman, R-S.C., told The Daily Signal Thursday evening. “We’ve got a group that are hard-liners with that. I’m one of them. The cancer in this country is overspending and we’ve got to address it.”
The Super Bowl moment has come for this ten-year spending package, as Senate leadership eyes a weekend vote that would send the bill to the House before the preferred deadline of Independence Day, July 4.
The bill would fulfill a number of campaign promises, such as extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and funding border security, but some in the House have expressed serious concerns about how it has evolved.
Norman is particularly concerned by a number of recent rulings from the Senate parliamentarian, essentially the chamber’s referee, who has slashed a number of cost-saving provisions like that blocking illegal immigrants from accessing Medicaid.
Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has done this via the Byrd rule, a Senate rule generally intended to banish non-budgetary provisions in ten-year fiscal frameworks.
“Now’s the time to look at each one of these, and if it means overruling it, do it and question it because this is our moment in time to make a difference,” said Norman.
Norman specified that he wanted a Senate vote to overturn the rulings and that he was not calling for Vice President JD Vance to simply overrule them as presiding officer of the Senate.
“It’s time to fight,” he said. “If we have to sit up here through July 4 and have to sit up here in all of August on our break, we need to do it. This bill is that important.”
He added, “I’m excited about having a bill that mirrors what we sent over there. And if there’s too many changes and more spending, it’s going to be a difficult bill to pass.”
Norman’s colleagues, such as Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, are predicting that proposals in the Senate could cost an extra trillion dollars over the ten-year window.
Norman says he will not accept any proposal that balloons the deficit to that level.
“Chip and Andy are exactly right. It’s a real problem. We’ll look at everything, but this is really something that we would be backing up on what we had initially told the American people and our constituents that we were going to do,” Norman said.
But Norman has one source of optimism—he does not think a bill like that would pass the Senate in the first place.
“I don’t think it’s going to get out of the Senate. And we met with different Senators recently and they’ve got a bloc over that I think are going to put up enough resistance to not let it get out of the Senate.”
Norman is likely referring to Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
All of them would have to unite against the bill if they wanted to prevent it from passing, since Vice President JD Vance would likely break a tie in the chamber.
These Senate fiscal hawks give Norman hope that the House will ultimately get a bill that resembles the one they sent the Senate.
“In large, what we are expecting is predominantly the bill that we sent over with those provisions, those cuts and that’s what we worked for.”
One thing Norman demands is time to read the bill once—or if—the Senate passes it.
“I do think we’ll be back Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whenever they get it to us. This isn’t a Nancy Pelosi regime where you have to pass it, then read it and find out what’s in it. We’re going to read it before we pass it and right now it’s got some problems.”
