Senate Republicans and their majority leader are Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to punishing Russia with sanctions after bad Vlad Putin and crew upped their missile strikes against Ukraine. Political strongmen tend to get a little testy when they suspect the countries they’re attacking of trying to blow them up. As Axios reported earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was “ready to move on a popular, bipartisan sanctions bill if Russia won’t come to the table in good faith” on a peace deal.
“Senate Republicans are seizing on President Trump’s growing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin to argue the time to impose fresh sanctions on Russia is now,” the news outlet reported. Axios apparently carpooled with the rest of the corporate news gang on the “angry” “frustration” talking points expressway.
Senate Republicans are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
Tough-talking Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is buddying up with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on an economic sanctions bill aimed at bringing Russia to the negotiating table. Graham says there’s a “new sheriff in town. The old playbook won’t work this time.”
But the old playbook remains sadly in fashion in so many ways in Washington, D.C.
Wouldn’t it be swell if Senate Republicans displayed the same level of passion and urgency when it comes to cutting taxes, shrinking government, and protecting our borders? While a lot of Americans agree with Trump that “crazy” Putin may be “playing with fire,” they would like to see their representatives in Washington, D.C., take some interest in pressing matters at home.
Whatever you think of President Trump’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” and the House-passed reconciliation package as it stands is colossal, it does deliver on key policy issues Americans overwhelmingly support. Topping that list is the huge provision that locks in the wildly popular tax cuts Trump signed in his first term. When the clock strikes 2026, the law preventing the IRS from grabbing more of your hard-earned money turns back into a pumpkin without action from Congress.
‘Families Stand to Gain’
Democrats have long despised the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, a cornerstone achievement of Trump 1.0. Every Democrat in the House voted against the OBB, and Senate Democrats are poised to do the same — if the stiff-necked, Republican-controlled upper house gets its act together. Liberals loathe the idea of depriving the cancer of Big Government its life source — trillions of dollars in taxpayer money. Middle-income Americans, however, have grown quite fond of the tax relief, and understandably so. According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax cut extension will protect the average taxpayer from a 22 percent tax hike. Additionally, the House bill ends taxes on tips, overtime, and auto loan interest.
“Families stand to gain over $13,000 in take-home pay, and workers could see wage increases of more than $11,000,” Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said in a statement following the narrowest of House passage of the bold bill.
There’s debate over the extent, but the relief is as real as the economic pain an instant tax hike would create.
A poll conducted last month by those nutty libertarians at the Cato Institute in collaboration with YouGov found what should be abundantly clear to even the most obtuse policymaker: That Americans feel they are taxed way too much already, and they don’t want to be taxed more. According to the poll, 81 percent of respondents say they cannot afford higher taxes next year; 85 percent support extending the 2017 tax cuts “if it prevents an average tax increase of $1,000 to $2,000 per person.”
“Most Americans (55 percent) think their taxes are too high, a view also shared by more than half of Democrats,” wrote Cato’s Adam Michel.
The same proportion of respondents believe they pay more than their fair share in taxes when weighing “what you get from the federal government.” Thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) we’ve been learning a lot more about what we are getting: criminal levels of government waste.
‘Democrats Continue to Lie’
Despite the gnashing of teeth from Democrats and their pals in corporate media over the bill’s cuts to government spending, a solid majority of Americans want Congress to bring the ax. According to Cato’s Fiscal Policy National Survey, 61 percent of Americans surveyed disagreed with the liberal argument that “the 2017 tax cuts should expire because it won’t be worth the federal spending cuts necessary to make them permanent.” It should come as no surprise, then, that more than three in four Americans believe the federal government spends too much and that 59 cents of every tax dollar is wasted, according to the poll.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the OBB includes about $1.5 trillion in net spending cuts. Of course the same Democrats who have made a principled liberal stance for more waste, fraud, and abuse in government are now Chicken Little-ing the proposed cuts to Medicaid and other welfare programs in the big bill. They warn about the millions of illegal immigrants, able-bodied deadbeats, and fraudsters who will lose Medicaid benefits.
Michael Steele, a Trump-hating liberal who has posed as a conservative, faithfully delivered the Democratic Party’s talking points this week in insisting the battle over the OBB is another in the fight for the soul of the Republican Party — Steele’s tired mantra.
“But whether they realize it or not, they’ll also be debating the future of the Republican Party. Is it a party of Trump — tossing new parents, tipped workers and seniors a few crumbs while cutting the social safety net and giving very wealthy individuals a massive tax cut? Or are there enough old-school conservatives left to make the bill more economically responsible?” the former GOP chairman and MSNBC shill opined.
Cutting the social safety net? What a twit. The House bill demands able-bodied Americans on government benefits seek employment, a position Americans overwhelmingly support. Even the left-leaning groups constantly pushing for expanded welfare have gotten the memo.
“Overall, about six in ten (62%) adults support work requirements, which would require nearly all adults to be working or looking for work in order to have health insurance through Medicaid,” a KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation) Health Tracking Poll from February found, even as it showed glowing support for the taxpayer-funded health insurance program.
“If you have to think about the four things that we’re doing in Medicaid to strengthen it, we’re removing anybody that is illegal, ineligible or duplicate, and we’re ensuring that able-bodied adults, on the expansion population, have a very modest work requirement, in exchange for receiving benefits. Those things are overwhelmingly supported by the American people, yet the Democrats continue to lie about what this bill is actually doing,” Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
‘I was Disappointed’
The big problem with the One Big Beautiful Bill for conservatives like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is the legislation falls well short of fixing escalating deficits and debt. They see it as a “debt bomb.” Accounting for all of its provisions, including the spending cuts, the Tax Foundation estimates the bill would raise budget deficits by about $2.6 trillion over a decade without taking expanded economic growth into consideration, and by $1.7 trillion based on dynamic accounting methods.
That’s one big headache for Senate fiscal hawks like Johnson, Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rick Scott, R-Fla. and a bigger headache for Thune and company as they try to forge a compromise deal that can deliver 51 votes.
With a national debt north of $36 trillion, the senators have reason for concern. The OBB isn’t sitting well with Trump’s chief waste trimmer.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Elon Musk, the multibillionaire businessman and top Trump adviser who has led DOGE’s government spending liposuction efforts, told CBS News.
Such concerns noted, the bill also funds the addition of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Department of Homeland Security officers among other provisions to secure the border. Border security, including dealing with the nation’s illegal immigration crisis, was one of the top issues in November’s election. The bill also funds at least 1 million deportations, a policy supported by a majority of Americans. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 55 percent of those surveyed support increasing deportations of immigrants without legal status.
‘Impressive Bipartisan Support’
So what are Senate Republicans doing about it? They’re working with Democrats and the industrial military complex to hammer Putin with sanctions — undoubtedly a prelude for more taxpayer-funded checks for more weapons of someone else’s wars. As EuroNews reported, a Senate sanctions bill is “rapidly making its way through the United States Senate and gathering impressive bipartisan support.”
Rapidly.
“Our legislation will isolate Russia – putting it on a trade island by imposing stiff tariffs on other countries that support these atrocities,” Graham and Blumenthal said last week in announcing the bill had attracted 81 signatures.
Priorities.
If only the Senate’s passion to take on Putin were as powerful as its will to lift the burden of big government, taxation and debt off the backs of the Americans they’re supposed to be serving.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
